Earth Equity News

What Will Drive the 'Innovation Revolution'? By Andrew Revkin, NYTimes, July 15, 2008. "Almost all the experts I've talked to in 20 years of exploring the entwined climate and energy challenges [we face] agree that satisfying global energy demand while limiting human influence on climate will require revolutionary advances in both policy and technology. Mr. Romm [Joseph Romm, the former Energy Department official who now blogs on climate and works for the Center for American Progress] is among those who agree this is not an either/or debate. The debate [Romm has with my recent post] is over emphasis. [He] and many environmental campaigners and energy entrepreneurs say that markets, laws, public campaigns and leadership can prompt the technological transformation, and that government research money has mainly been a distraction and a delaying device promoted by industries or political operatives wedded to fossil fuels. Whatever the merits of that debate, there sure are a lot of seasoned experts in energy technology and economics (Daniel Nocera at M.I.T., Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia) who insist that climate stability will not happen without a huge increase in direct spending for R&D along with everything else. In the end, there are two means of speeding the move away from climate-warming energy choices, as Daniel Schrag of Harvard has explained here before: boosting the public will to act (and accept the costs of the energy-technology transition) or eliminating the cost difference between polluting and nonpolluting energy choices. The latter can happen by making clean-energy technologies cheaper and/or by making climate-warming technologies more expensive (through a tax or cap)."