This is, I think, an extremely important question to examine. Anyone who is interested in avoiding catastrophic climate outcomes should formulate a rough answer in his or her head, if for no other reason than to figure out if and/or when 450 ppm might become politically achievable — since it surely isn’t right now (see here). [This post will also allow me to once again debunk the myth that a plausible price for CO2 would mainly drive efficiency and conservation.]

This question arose in the comments section of Tuesday’s post, “Bear with me, readers — it does matter why Pielke, his Nature article, and the Breakthrough Institute are wrong.” It shows that all the back-and-forth is at least focusing on key issues and making my differences with them clearer, sort of.

Ted Nordhaus (here) seemed to question my statement that, among many other things, we need a major price change (to have CO2 prices match their economic damages) in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 ppm (as I wrote here)

Then Ted wrote (here), “We strongly support carbon regulation that establishes a modest, sustainable, and consistent price for carbon.”

So I naturally wondered (here):

TED– WHAT’S YOUR CO2 Price?

You say I sound like environmentalist because I think we need a “major price change.” Then you say, you support a “modest, sustainable, and consistent price for carbon.”

Can you ballpark that price for me? Apparently you don’t want the market to set it on the basis of whatever is needed to achieve 450 ppm, as I do, which will certainly be a major price, which I would define as a price roughly equal to or greater than the current European price — $23 Euros a ton of CO2.

So you would set a “modest” price and hope that works? I can’t go with you there, sorry!

At 1:25 today, Ted posted (here)

Joe, For a guy so ready to take a 2X4 to the head of anybody who you believe has misused or misunderstands technical terminology, you are awfully sloppy yourself. The current EU carbon price is $23E per ton of carbon, not CO2. If you meant to write per ton of carbon, then we are largely in agreement as to what a modest price for carbon would be, if not what it’s [sic] effects on carbon emissions and prospects for achieving 450 ppm will likely be.

If you actually meant $23E per ton of CO2, a price almost four times the current EU price for carbon then we disagree, both as to the price point and it’s likely efficacy.

A classic unverified comment blurted out — a lesson for all who blog/comment, me included, to always verify on Google that which is easily verified! Ted is, of course, quite wrong. I use Point Carbon (here) for the latest price of European Union Allowances (EUAs), which is 23.5 euros as of now. EUAs are “Tradable emission credits from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Each allowance carries the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide” (see here).

[I am not one to say "I told you so" ... okay, I am, I mean, I did after all just write a post titled "The biggest source of mistakes: C vs. CO2".]

Anyway, I was in the middle of lunch so I didn’t reply right away. And I did want to see if anybody else would catch the mistake.

At 2:10, Ted corrected himself (here)

Correction. I believe I confused the standard generally used in the EU, carbon not CO2, with the pricing of EUA in the EU ETS which appears to be CO2. Joe’s statement of the carbon price in the EU appears to be correct. One which I believe will primarily drive efficiency and conventional fuel switching, not rapid adoption of alternative technologies.

Well, it’s good to know my statement “appears to be correct” [Note to Ted: For a guy who just accused me incorrectly of sloppiness, would it kill you to just say "Joe's statement was correct"? I withdraw the question.]

Note: Google currently claims “1 Euro = 1.571 U.S. dollars.”

PRICE CONFUSION ABOUNDS AT B.I.

So my apologies if I’m now a tad confused. A couple hours ago, Ted dismissed $23E (= $36/tCO2) but embraced $23E per ton of carbon (= $36/tC) as the kind of modest price he endorsed, albeit without suggesting what its effects might be.

One hour later, Ted said that $23E (= $36/tCO2 = $132/tC) will “primarily drive efficiency and conventional fuel switching, not rapid adoption of alternative technologies.”

So my questions to Ted and B.I. are

Read more

Do we need technology breakthroughs to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 parts per million and avert climate catastrophe?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not think so, as I explained here (although they certainly want to spend more money on R&D, as does everyone on the planet who cares about global warming except maybe Senator John McCain). I agree with the IPCC, as do most energy analysts I know.

People who don’t see global warming as an urgent matter, like President Bush, his Sience Advisor, his former Energy Secretary, Gingrich, Lomborg, and Michael Crichton, think we can’t possibly solve the problem without breakthroughs (see “The Debate of the Decade” for most of the quotes or links) — or at least that’s what they say.

Then we have the Breakthrough Institute (B.I.), which, as its name suggests, also thinks we need breakthroughs, but seems to be quite genuinely concerned about global warming. The Breakthrough Institute was founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the famous “The Death of Environmentalism” essay and the recent book Breakthrough. Roger Pielke, Jr., among others, is a Fellow.

In this post, I’ll explain why the answer to the question posed is “no” and why that’s a good thing! The short answer is

• Energy technology breakthroughs (defined below) hardly ever happen.
• Even when they do happen, they rarely have a transformative impact on energy markets, even over a span of decades.

‘BREAKTHROUGH’ DEFINED

So what does the word ‘breakthrough’ mean? A classic definition might be “a strikingly important advance or discovery.” Merriam-Webster says it’s “a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique.” Wikipedia, in its long entry on innovation, says

“Breakthrough, disruptive or radical innovation … involves launching an entirely novel product or service rather than providing improved products & services along the same lines as currently…. Involves larger leaps of understanding… There is often considerable uncertainty about future outcomes. … Radical innovation involves considerable change in basic technologies and methods.

These seem reasonable to me. Slow, incremental improvement is not a breakthrough. The windpower industry has dropped its costs steadily by a factor of 10 over the past quarter century, while slowly improving performance. These are the steady gains we expect as a technology moves along the manufacturing learning curve and achieves economies of scale. Heck many technologies like wind even have a predictable link between product cost and installed capacity (see here) — that is a key reason deployment policies are much more important than spending huge sums looking for breakthroughs. [If there has been anything anybody in the wind industry would call a technology breakthrough as defined here, I'd be interested in hearing about it.]

Now B.I. recently accused me (here) of using “an extremely narrow definition of the word ‘breakthrough’ because it’s much easier for him to refute. But if he had read Breakthrough’s policy whitepaper, “Fast, Clean, Cheap,” [JR: I have. It's not something I can recommend to anyone else.] he would know that we call for breakthroughs in performance, price, and brand-new technologies“:

Technological breakthroughs are needed to boost the performance of current clean energy technologies and to decrease the cost of deploying them. Without these breakthroughs, the costs of these technologies are too high, and their performance and return on investment too low, to justify private sector investment in their widespread deployment….

Finally, in order to be deployed at levels that might allow them to displace conventional energy sources on a large scale, clean energy alternatives like solar and wind will require significant improvement in the cost and performance of battery and other energy storage technologies.

Well, you can call a dog a cat, but it’s still a dog. You don’t need breakthroughs to do any of that. One way to see that is to look at the wind or PV industry over the past decade — lots of private sector investment and widespread deployment in states or countries where there are public policies to encourage deployment, not so much where there isn’t. Yet its the same technology around the country and the world. Hmmm. In any case, those sentences don’t define what the word means. They just assert some outcomes that B.I. claims breakthroughs are needed for. But, as we’ve seen, those outcomes don’t require breakthroughs. So this isn’t a definition.

I will be blogging at length about concentrated solar power in a couple of days, and none of the industry executives I spoke to believe they need breakthroughs or massive government R&D support of the kind B.I. wants — what they want is the solar investment tax credit renewed this year for eight years and a serious price for carbon dioxide as soon as possible. They also wouldn’t kick a national renewable portfolio standard out of bed for eating crackers.

Still, B.I. claims, “We need breakthroughs in all of these areas because, as the Nature piece showed, the technology gap is that big. Romm misinterprets what others say in very narrow terms to create conflict where there is none.” [So you see where the Nature piece fits in and why it must be wrong -- since it shows something that isn't true.]

We don’t need breakthroughs in any of those areas, as I’ll explain in a few days when I lay out the “solution” to global warming in a few days.

But I don’t think I misinterpreted anyone. The definition I used for breakthrough in my previous debunking of Shellenberger and Nordhaus on this matter comes from their September 24, 2007 article in The New Republic (see here, first page), which the magazine says was adapted from their book Breakthrough:

Read more

As the Associated Press reports, a New Jersey high school senior has raised concerns about a right-wing screed being passed off as a college-level government textbook. Student Matthew LaClair of Kearny, NJ — whose AP Goverment class uses American Goverment — “was particularly upset about the book’s treatment of global warming.”

The book’s authors James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio Jr. claim that “the scientific community is divided over the issue,” and “activist scientists say that the earth is getting warmer; skeptical ones note that the earth’s atmosphere has been getting cooler.” Environmentalists are portrayed as “elites who often base their arguments on ideology as much as facts” and “raise money with scary statements about the harm global warming will cause.”

The authors go even further, under the heading “The Environmental Uncertainties:”

Science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all. [p. 569]

Needless to say, the greenhouse effect exists, and the danger of man-made warming is all too clear.

The authors of “American Government” are conservative ideologues with strong ties to the Bush administration:

– James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of American Enterprise Institute, the premier Bush-Exxon think tank.

– John DiIulio Jr., a University of Pennsylvania professor, was the first head of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Famous for his now-recanted prediction that America would be overrun by “superpredator” criminal teenagers in the 1990s, DiIulio has also been a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, another Bush-Exxon think tank.

After being notified by LaClair, the Center for Inquiry detailed the book’s lies about global warming, school prayer, same-sex marriage, the influence of original sin on the Constitution’s framers, and more. Their scathing critique is forcing the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and the College Board, who runs the Advanced Placement program, to review the book, now in its eleventh edition.

UPDATE: This is not the first time LaClair has made news; he taped a history teacher preaching Biblical fundamentalism in 2006 and protested Bush by not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance in 2005.

UPDATE II: Friends of the Earth has just announced an e-mail campaign to Houghton Mifflin. They note esteemed climate scientists Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Michael MacCracken have already written to the publisher.

EXCERPTS from “American Government”: Read more