Offshore wind energy is one sector of the clean economy that has been able to realize its job-creating potential in other parts of the world. While America has yet to install our first offshore turbine, other countries are moving quickly to capitalize on this vast resource. France waded into the fray most recently with the announcement of a plan for five offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of three GW—an endeavor they project will support more than 10,000 jobs in the first round of bidding.

While the enormous opportunity for offshore wind energy from America’s oceans has been known for years, an area of lesser focus but perhaps comparable opportunity is the Great Lakes. Winds there average between 17.9 and 20.1 mph, just a bit slower than the storied gales off the northern Atlantic coast. And although recent studies continue to affirm that the benefits of offshore wind in the Great Lakes outweigh the potential drawbacks, area developers—like their saltwater counterparts—have yet to reap the benefits of this massive untapped resource.

Last month, CAP’s Michael Conathan and Richard Caperton detailed how far behind the United States has fallen in offshore wind development. As dozens of U.S.-based projects hang in financial and regulatory limbo, Europe has nearly 3,000 MW of installed capacity with permits issued for an additional 22,000 MW. And China has over 100 MW installed and has issued permits for 13,600 MW more. The CAP report echoed a Pike Research study citing favorable public policy and a market-based approach as factors facilitating Europe’s booming industry.

America’s snail-paced race for offshore wind has been dominated by projects along the Atlantic seaboard, but a dedicated group of Ohioans believes they can be first. Encouraged by public support and the results of multiple feasibility studies, Cleveland-based Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation, or LEEDCo, is a collaboration between Cuyahoga and Lorain counties, the Cleveland Foundation, the City of Cleveland, and NorTech Energy. Its goal: a 20 MW project that will serve as a catalyst for freshwater wind development across the eight-state region, while simultaneously driving wind turbine manufacturing to Ohio’s existing component and construction materials industries.  Its mission is rooted in a statewide initiative spurred by a renewable energy report issued in 2004, and its operations received a tremendous boost from former Gov. Ted Strickland, whose last act as outgoing governor granted the company exclusive development rights to a portion of the lakebed owned by the state.

Both the Ohio initiative and Strickland’s 11th-hour action were inspired in part by the potential to reverse painful job losses in the region. Overall, Ohio lost 418,000 manufacturing jobs from 1999 to 2009, and Cuyahoga County, which borders Lake Erie and includes the city of Cleveland, was the hardest hit in the state.

In addition to the economic benefits, a commitment to renewable energy in the Great Lakes has the potential to significantly reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions across the region. According to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, “C02 emissions from power plants in the eight Great Lakes states totaled an estimated 679 million tons in 2010, nearly 30% of the US total for that year.”

One aspect of this project that really distinguishes LEEDCo from other offshore wind endeavors is the bottom-up approach and sustained community involvement. Wagner attributes this to a few simple principles. The first is the fact that they strove to present the community with factual information in a balanced, transparent manner from the outset. A wide range of stakeholders were invited to the table at the very beginning and their engagement was maintained through regular community forums and other outreach activities.

As Wagner explains, “Representing the public’s interest ranges from discussing economic development and environmental implications through consensus building to actually ensuring that the offshore wind industry growth potential is maximized during implementation while protecting the well-being of the Lake.” This community-based approach to job creation, innovation, and energy development has helped LEEDCo earn the support of an array of stakeholders and position a Rust Belt city to establish itself as a leader in every aspect of the freshwater wind industry.

The second key aspect of the Lake Erie model is the size of the project. Learning from the success of similar European projects, LEEDCo has adopted a “start small” approach, says Wagner. “The 5 to 7 turbine (20-30 MW) [project] is modest in size, is adequately distant from shore (7 to 10 miles), and will be used to validate nearly every aspect of the first freshwater offshore wind project in North America.”

But starting small doesn’t mean LEEDCo isn’t dreaming big. In 2009, the company commissioned an economic impact study to evaluate the local and regional impacts that up to 5,000 MW of offshore wind development would have on Ohio. The results were overwhelmingly positive. The study found that the first project would directly create 600 jobs “and up to 8,000 regionally as the region scales up capacity toward 5,000 MW by 2030. This scenario would create approximately $7.8 billion in wages and salaries, $22.6 billion in sales, and $586.5 million in public revenues.” Even if Ohio develops just 1,500 MW, “it would still be on track to create or maintain nearly 3,000 jobs, $2.2 billion of wages, $6.5 billion in sales, and $171.5 million in public revenues—both state and local.”

As with other offshore wind projects, however, the potential environmental and economic benefits of offshore wind development have not been sufficient to overcome what is arguably the industry’s greatest challenge: regulatory uncertainty. LEEDCo’s goal is to use its pilot project as an opportunity to bring together the approximately 18 different required permitting agencies in an attempt to establish a functional regulatory platform for investors and project developers. Wagner hopes that “through dialogue, cooperation, and transparency, we can get these different agencies to work together during the pilot project in ways that benefit the state, public, and industry as a whole. Helping Ohio establish a regulatory environment that is efficient, understandable, and respectful of the needs of all parties is a major step toward bringing the costs of [offshore wind] planning and implementation down.”

Despite the frustrations, Wagner and his LEEDCo colleagues remain focused on their vision of revitalizing northeastern Ohio, and believe the importance of being first can’t be overstated. “With no offshore projects built yet in the United States, much less in freshwater, LEEDCo believes that if Ohio can build the first project then it will be able to pioneer and develop new intellectual property that other regions will be looking to for an example.” As the race for offshore wind in the United States wears on, it seems more possible that our first offshore wind project may not involve the ocean after all.

Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director for Ocean Communications at American Progress. This article is cross posted from the American Progress website.

See also:

• Clean Energy from America’s Oceans by Michael Conathan and Richard W. Caperton

The top five ways companies are integrating renewables into the grid are:

1.  Intelligent Demand Response
2.  Microinverters and Maximum Power Point Trackers
3.  Wind Energy Management Tools
4.  The Virtual Power Plant
5.  The Hybrid Solar-Gas Power Plant

Explanations of each of these with videos are below.

Background

Intermittent renewables at high penetrations will bring new challenges for the grid. But how big will they be? And is it true that wind and solar will necessarily need storage or natural gas back-up at high levels?

The International Energy Agency wanted to know, so it modeled a variety of high-penetration scenarios in eight geographic regions around the world. Hugo Chandler, a senior policy analyst with the IEA explains the organization’s findings to Climate Progress:

Variability is not just some new phenomenon in grid management. What we found is that renewable energy is not fundamentally different. The criticisms of renewables often neglect the complementarities between different technologies and the way they can balance each other out if spread over certain regions and energy types.

Grid operators are constantly working to balance available supply with demand – it’s what they do. There are always natural variations that cause spikes in demand, reductions in supply or create disturbances in frequency and voltage. Once you see there are a variety of ways to properly manage that variability, you start whittling away at the argument that you always need storage or a megawatt of natural gas backup for every megawatt of renewable energy.

Theoretical modeling is important. But what companies are doing in reality?

Here’s five of the top methods for integrating renewable energy into the grid – proving that intermittency isn’t the show-stopper that critics make it out to be.

Intelligent Demand Response

Intelligent demand response is often called the “killer app” of the smart grid. Demand response is not a new concept – but the “intelligent” part is still somewhat new.

The demand-response leader, EnerNOC, is now applying this concept to renewable energy. The company announced earlier this year that it would work with a Northwestern transmission operator to help manage demand to meet the fluctuating output of wind electricity in the system. EnerNOC president David Brewster calls it “the perfect dancing partner for wind.” By ramping up demand at facilities during time of peak supply and lowering demand when supply drops off, the grid can respond to changing conditions in real time without the need for storage.

Microinverters and Maximum Power Point Trackers

Inverters are the gateway to the grid – turning Direct Current electricity from solar PV systems to grid-friendly Alternating Current. Over the past several years, there’s been a revolution in inverter technologies that allow project owners to more effectively regulate system performance. One technology, the microinverter, is installed on the back of individual panels, turning each module into its own unit and providing real-time data on how each is operating. Therefore, if clouds roll over a PV system, the “Christmas tree light effect” is avoided, and each panel still functions normally, maximizing the output of a system – sometimes by 20% or more.

Speaking of maximizing output, that’s where Maximum Power Point Trackers (MPPT) come in. These pieces of power electronics are also installed on the back of individual panels. But they’re not microinverters; instead, they boost voltage to an optimal range for a central inverter, thus allowing the device to run more efficiently. By allowing a system owner to control a PV plant at the module level, you can boost performance on the module level and regulate voltage even as weather patterns change.

Wind Energy Management Tools

SCADA systems that remotely monitor wind farm performance have been around for years – but there are a host of new applications being developed that allow grid operators and utilities monitor system-wide performance in an easier, more compelling way.

The Wind Energy Management System from the Portuguese company Logica is a great example. The company manages over 3 gigawatts of wind farms in the U.S. and Europe using its WEMS, which allows for real-time monitoring of a set of geographically dispersed wind plants – providing the tools to balance voltage, ramp wind farms up and down quickly, and plan for maintenance.

A company like EnerNOC provides the tools for better management on the demand side; a company like Logica provides the tools for better integration on the supply side.

The Virtual Power Plant

Virtual power plants combine intelligent demand response with supply-side management software, bringing distributed renewable energy plants together to form a “virtual” centralized resource.

We previously wrote about Germany’s Regenerative Combined Power Plant, a project that proved existing renewable energy technologies could provide 100% of the country’s electricity. The project blended three wind farms worth 12.6 MW, 20 solar PV plants totaling 5.5 MW, four biogas systems equaling 4 MW and a pumped storage system with 8.4 GWh of storage. By using geographically dispersed renewable resources that compliment one another, the plant operators were able to meet needs on the grid as supply and demand shifted. The project shows that with better information technologies and a balanced set of resources, the intermittency issue can be dealt with.

The Hybrid Power Plant

While innovative grid management tools will allow us to scale wind and solar without an equivalent MW to MW backup, there will definitely be a need to better integrate renewables and fossil energies to boost output and maximize current infrastructure.

Concentrating Solar Power can be a great way to increase efficiencies of newer fossil fuel-based infrastructure that may be around for a while. A number of companies are integrating direct-steam CSP technologies into coal or natural gas plants. FPL recently finished a 75 MW combined CSP/natural gas plant in Florida, with plans to add 500 more MW of hybrid plants in the coming years; Areva Solar is building a 44-MW plant at a coal facility in Australia; and GE, which recently invested in e-Solar, plans to integrate CSP technology into its natural gas plants, boosting power plant efficiencies substantially.

In an ideal world, CSP would be developed on its own to phase out fossil-based plants. And that is happening. But in order to scale these technologies, drop costs and better utilize power plants that are in operation (or switch from burning coal to far more efficient natural gas), the hybrid approach is a very attractive option. Here’s how one type of direct-steam CSP plant works:

To categorically claim that intermittent renewables can’t scale without hurting the grid ignores the very real innovations that are evolving today.

As the IEA’s Hugo Chandler explains: “We want to explode the myth that there’s a technological limit.”

Stephen Lacey is a reporter with Climate Progress, where this article is cross-posted.

The speakers agreed with Rep. Hoyer that manufacturing is essential to the American economy and that the United States needs a solid long term game-plan to keep manufacturing clean and in America.  The discussion echoed the main points of a CAP Paper “Low Carbon Innovation: A Uniquely American Strategy for Industrial Renewal” that was released at the event.  Below is a summary of the paper. You can also access the full report here, and the introduction and summary here.

Innovating for a Low Carbon Future

Our nation’s innovation and competitive drive in the 20th century powered the U.S. economy to global leadership, helped win two World Wars and one Cold War, created unprecedented and broad-based economic prosperity, and established the technology that enabled the conquest of the moon and today’s Information Age.  Today, this same engine of innovation is in serious jeopardy as we look across the competitive landscape of the 21st century.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, in recent years the manufacturing sector, which for decades supplied millions of Americans with stable, well-paying jobs and sustained our country’s ability to innovate has shrunk. U.S. companies found many reasons to shift manufacturing overseas. This not only costs jobs but also, as the Harvard Business Review points out, it costs our economy’s ability to make high-tech products and invent new ones.

Compounding this threat to American competitiveness in coming years are the increasing risks that U.S. businesses will face from global warming. The consequences of global climate change will deliver real, and potentially very large, economic costs.  America also suffers from a confused planning environment for infrastructure and economic decision making, which makes it difficult to move forward on any comprehensive plan to bolster sustainable economic growth. Congressional inaction on climate legislation and policies to deploy clean and efficient energy technologies here at home are creating deep uncertainties for business planning.  Meanwhile, our competitors in other nations, are already retooling their industries and infrastructure for a clean energy future.

The U.S. needs clear long-term climate and clean energy policies, and a supporting low-carbon economic growth strategy to overcome the challenges above.  Accordingly, in a paper entitled “Low-carbon Innovation: A Uniquely American Strategy for Industrial Renewal,” the Center for American Progress is proposing a low-carbon economic growth strategy to keep America the innovative industrial leader of the world.   The strategy builds on our existing regional ecosystem of economic development policies and it aligns policies across different branches of government.  The purpose is to put forth smart incentives that engage private capital markets in deploying essential low-carbon technologies and reinvigorating investment in cutting-edge infrastructure.

The U.S. economy is an “innovation-driven” economy, according to the World Economic Forum. The United States became a global economic leader by building a diverse economy driven by a continuous innovation business model—one that values inventing, manufacturing, and continually reengineering value-added products and sophisticated technologies. Innovation is our area of expertise and it is at the center of our low-carbon industrial strategy.

Building innovation networks that are greater than the sum of their parts

In the paper we’ve identified five types of market actors whose participation is essential for low-carbon industrial renewal, and identified key policies for each to spur the innovation.  These include:

Coordinating policymakers and regulators

Policymakers, regulators, and program officers in federal and state agencies play an important role in  every stage of innovation and industrial development, whether by siting new transmission infrastructure,  permitting a new wind farm, providing programmatic support to help finance an advanced manufacturing facility, or coordinating public R&D research funds. Policymakers, regulators, and  government agencies can directly facilitate the growth of low-carbon markets and industries by aligning all efforts to build strong market demand, by influencing government procurement practices, and by offering clear frameworks for business planning within their rulemaking and legislating.

Empowering clean energy researchers

From advanced electric vehicle batteries to super-cheap solar panels to the manufacturing processes that produce them, research conducted in government, university, and corporate labs is critical to advancing innovation and the growth of low-carbon industries. Public policies provide important support for scientists and engineers as they work to create low-carbon solutions to industrial challenges, and ensure their discoveries can move quickly into the market.

Mobilizing clean energy manufacturers

Manufacturers who develop the supply chains, production processes, and marketing strategies to scale up the supply of American clean energy products, equipment, and technology play an important role in innovation and form the basis of industrial growth. Public policies play a critical role in helping America’s existing industrial base navigate the transition to a clean energy economy, supporting worker training and retooling manufacturing for low-carbon technologies.

Incentivizing clean energy investors

The task of innovating and scaling up a new technological foundation for U.S. industry based on clean energy requires harnessing flows of private capital. Clean energy and energy efficiency standards can send powerful signals to investors on the permanence of clean energy markets, while targeted financing assistance programs can help mitigate risks and unlock private capital for clean energy. These policies can leverage private capital more effectively within stalled capital markets and can improve incentives for private investment in clean energy research, commercialization, and deployment.

Engaging clean energy consumers

The consumers of clean energy products and technology provide the critical domestic market demand that makes industrial growth and innovation possible. Without consumers to purchase and use zero-emission vehicles, building owners and construction firms to use energy-efficient building materials, or utilities to invest in and operate renewable-energy-generating technologies, there is no revenue stream for the manufacturers of those goods, no reason for investors to provide capital, and no market application for clean energy research. Consumer-driven demand—from families to businesses to utility companies— is what makes clean energy innovation and industrial transformation possible.

Public policies can increase demand for clean energy goods and services by establishing meaningful incentives for utilities, building owners, and consumers to invest in clean energy technologies instead of fossil-fuel energy generation. Indeed, policy is essential to dramatically increase the predictability, transparency, and long-term certainty of clean energy markets to reach economies of scale and bring down cost.

The bottom line is that when these five groups work together by exchanging information, money, and risk, the network they form is more innovative than the sum of its parts. Together they can accomplish what none of them can do alone. With this understanding, we’ve organized our discussion of specific policies through the lens of how to engage each of these constituencies and encourage the formation of an informal national clean energy innovation network. In the paper we further lay out the principles for how policy can align the interests of each of these industrial and economic actors around shared efforts to drive low-carbon innovation in America’s economy.

Access the full report here.

Access the executive summary here.

Bracken Hendricks is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Sean Pool is an Assistant Editor with the Center’s Science Progress project. Lisbeth Kaufman is a Special Assistant at the Center.

The antagonist de jour, of course, is China. Rapidly building advanced energy plant, grid, and end-use infrastructure that will outclass their creaky U.S. counterparts, the Asian giant, remarked Chu, is winning the “energy race.” Worse, more and more Americans worry that China is on the verge of surpassing the United States in science-and-technology innovation, even though the authoritarian nation faces a host of problems in its own innovation ecosystem.

Secretary Chu’s prescription? Increased federal investment in “scientific R&D.” In short: Remember the Sputnik moment.

Aerospace history has become a stock American folk syllogism recalling a fall from, and challenging a return to, grace. If we can put men on the moon, surely we can build a better mousetrap, or close the gap in the energy race. But is the problem really a crisis of American innovation?

If so, it does not stem from a lack of trying. Nuclear and photovoltaic power are American inventions, fuel cells were first made practicable in this country, and, for a time, electric cars and hydrogen power seemed just around the corner. The last 40 years have witnessed booms and busts in all of these systems. Yet American researchers do not appear to be running short of new ideas, as research in high-efficiency batteries, polymer photovoltaic systems, and artificial photosynthesis shows.

The issue instead seems to be the relationship between innovation and national industrial recovery and job creation. To the energy secretary, the broader federal science-and-technology policy establishment, and legions of private-sector R&D contractors, innovation policies and industrial policies are virtually one and the same. China, held Chu, had progressed industrially by taking a page from the U.S. playbook, using the state as a “slight rudder” to guide the private sector in taking the dominant role in R&D.

Actually, the Chinese government does quite a bit more to shape its energy economy than simply keeping a light hand on the tiller of national R&D. In fairness to Chu, he might have found those sorts of issues beyond his purview. Department of Energy Science Undersecretary Steven E. Koonin was a bit more forthcoming about the relationship between science, technology, and industry in an address at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in January 2010. He pointed out that change occurs much faster in IT than in the power source industry partly because it is physically less difficult to shift bytes than molecules, but also because in the United States there has been a disjunction between academic research and commercial manufacturing in the latter sector.

Koonin did not elaborate, but the reasons for this gap stem from the deep-seated belief of U.S. policymakers that government-supported science and technology can supplant regulation and planning in stimulating industrial growth. As it emerged after the Second World War, federal science-and-technology policy attempted to reconcile statism with free-market principles. This hybrid approach—call it American-style quasi-planning—assumed that the private sector and government had similar interests and, hence, that government-sponsored advanced science and technology could simply be injected into the economy much like a vaccine, with near-immediate salutary effects.

“Partners” in name only

This approach worked well in certain sectors, particularly in cases when the government was the sole or major customer for certain novel and otherwise unobtainable products that it asked industry to produce. In these cases it could bolster existing industries such as aviation and help incubate new ones such as electronics that readily spun off technologies into the civilian market without seriously disrupting existing interest groups. Business and state interests also meshed in the established fossil-fuel-based energy and ground transportation systems, with the federal government funding development of the interstate freeway system and prosecuting policies that secured plentiful supplies of cheap crude oil.

Where power sources were concerned, however, these interests frequently clashed for a mix of physical, political, and economic reasons. During the zenith of the Cold War, the federal government promoted work on photovoltaic cells, fuel cells, hydrogen, and nuclear power for special-purpose military and semimilitary roles. It also encouraged civilian applications of these technologies, largely, as in the case of nuclear power, for reasons of prestige and national security. But this was not easy and manufacturers had no strong incentive to try owing to the abundance of primary energy sources of various types in this period. They had to be plied with generous subsidies and even then they were not always enthusiastic.

Such conflicting imperatives were no better illustrated than in the Clinton administration’s Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, or PNGV. Styled by Vice President Al Gore as the automotive equivalent of the Apollo project, this cost-shared program in automobile R&D was initiated by the federal government on the false premise that automakers would welcome its efforts to encourage the modernization of the industrial base and increase fleet fuel efficiency through advanced systems like hybrid and fuel cell electric drive as politically acceptable alternatives to higher CAFE standards. The idea was to encourage voluntarism as an alternative to regulation, which Detroit regarded as forced technological change. But American manufacturers did not brook even this minimal interference in their affairs. They chose not to commercialize the supercar demonstrators they produced with government assistance and successfully resisted California’s efforts to legislate battery electric power.

Nor were American consumers then much interested in the new technologies, preferring massive, relatively unsophisticated gas guzzlers with improved safety features. But they changed their minds after Toyota and Honda introduced the hybrid electric passenger car in the early 2000s and the price of fuel skyrocketed around mid-decade. Belatedly, U.S. carmakers realized alterative products could be profitable, yet they lacked the capacity to produce them cost-effectively. The episode was something of a comedy of errors. In the 1990s Detroit spurned the mild medicine offered by the paternal hand of the state, only to collapse, atrophied, into the arms of government after a decade of brutal competition in the 2000s.

Nanotechnology: An energy revolution on the cheap?

So is nanotechnology the answer? A form of materials research emerging in the 1990s, nanotechnology was touted as another free-market solution to our energy problems. Its advocates believed that special nanoscale materials could make batteries, fuel cells, and photovoltaic cells cheaper, more durable, and more powerful by exploiting the high surface area and quantum properties of existing substances produced as nanoscale particulates and novel materials like carbon nanotubes and quantum dots.

Accordingly, an initial nudge by the federal government in the form of a relatively small R&D investment was expected to spawn a special materials industry that in turn would “self-assemble” (a favorite rhetorical flourish of nano-advocates drawn from utopian visions of molecular engineering) an industrial revolution on the cheap. Thus would the social and environmental collateral damage that had always attended such events in the past, and hence the need for government regulation, be obviated. The lobbying of nano-advocates prompted the Clinton administration to establish the National Nanotechnology Initiative, or NNI, in 2000.

Such assumptions cocked skeptical eyebrows in some parts of the science community but were generally tolerated, at least in quarters dependent on federal cash, if only because of worries of the effects of criticism on the money flow. Today there are a number of U.S. startup companies engaged in commercial development of nanomaterial-enabled power source technologies, including Konarka, a maker of organic photovoltaics, and battery component manufacturers Envia and Nanosys.

Probably the best known is Massachusetts-based A123. Its lithium-ion rechargeable battery uses nanostructured iron-phosphate electrodes to achieve what many observers regard as superior performance. Supported at every stage of its growth by the Department of Energy, A123 would, if successful, become the first American company to compete in the global market for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, one U.S. battery makers dabbled in but then abandoned in the early 1990s, when it amounted to only a few hundred million dollars. Today it is worth anywhere from $10 billion to $14 billion.

In the mid-2000s A123 set its sights on electric automobility, potentially the richest market of all, collaborating with General Motors in developing the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. The denouement revealed the paradoxes and limits of nanotechnology. Ultimately, GM selected South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd. to supply the Volt battery for a number of reasons that probably boiled down to a belief that its lithium manganese spinel technology, parts of which contained materials developed by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, posed fewer manufacturing and operating unknowns than A123’s more radical design.

The deal, which helped set up LG Chem in this emerging sector, will see batteries produced overseas until the firm opens a U.S. factory in 2012. Its manufacturing base hitherto located in Asia, A123 opened its first American plant in September 2010 using stimulus money intended to attract battery industry to the United States. For the time being, the company must make do servicing niche markets.

In essence, the various branches of the U.S. state worked at cross-purposes. With one hand, the DOE stood up a promising American company that was promptly punished for its inexperience by an auto company part-owned by the U.S. taxpayer; with the other, it indirectly helped a foreign company profit by the first American mass-produced hybrid electric passenger auto.

The battle of the electric automobile batteries is only the latest example of the hazards of quasi-planning. Tasked by the Obama administration to stimulate a job-rich sustainable energy industry, the DOE can conceive and gestate firms but is ill-equipped to bring them to maturity. It has virtually no power to alter industrial relations in the domestic market, much less in the global economy, especially the odd, asymmetrical system of codependency evolved by the United States and China that incentivizes American manufacturers to relocate abroad to exploit cheap labor in producing goods destined for the U.S. market but largely bars them from competing in the host country.

As A123 founder and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang explained to me at the Nanotechnology Innovation Summit last December, at a certain point in his company’s growth, the issue became one of industrial policy as much as research and development. Asian automakers, he remarked, would never dream of using batteries not produced in their home countries. An industrial pioneer brought to, but not yet quite over, the threshold of success, A123 faces challenging years ahead.

This tableau highlighted the complexities and contradictions of basing the revivification of one ailing heavy industry (automobile) on another (electrochemical energy storage) that was even more moribund. In a sense, given these complexities, the decisions of GM and the DOE were rational. The quickest way for American manufacturers to access advanced battery technology on an industrial scale was to ally with those foreign firms with advanced battery-manufacturing capabilities. If the objective of industrial rejuvenation is jobs, as U.S. politicians frequently claim, the strategic dependency that will result from such arrangements is less of a problem (where it involves staunch friends like South Korea and Japan) than the fact that much of the economic benefits are likely to remain abroad.

So while great strides have been made in nanotechnology, it is no free-market elixir. As a compound neologism, wrote former National Science Foundation chief Neal Lane in 2001, nanotechnology expressed, in a general sense, both current basic research (nano) and deep-future application (technology). But there has been a programmatic gulf between the two within the DOE. The third-most important federal sponsor of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology, or NSET, DOE has contributed $2.14 billion of the $12 billion spent thus far in the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Most of this has been spent through the DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Science, work conducted separately from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and its Industrial Technologies Program. Here, far less—only about $7 million in 2009—has been devoted to nanomanufacturing, although this figure is set to triple by the end of fiscal year 2011.

To be sure, this cleavage will probably have little immediate effect on long-term projects like the DOE’s ambitious effort in artificial photosynthesis, which aims to develop cheap single-crystal silicon nanowire semiconductors coated with cheap earth-abundant nanoscale metal catalysts to produce hydrogen and oxygen from sunlight and water. Researchers hope such systems can meet an expected doubling of current annual global energy consumption of around 15 terawatts by midcentury.

Last July the DOE’s Office of Science launched the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, investing $122 million in a Caltech-led partnership under the banner of Secretary Chu’s new “Energy Innovation Hubs” initiative. Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos opined that such work requires sustained support rather than a “pulse of money” and then stepping back to see the results, as has happened in other science fields in the past. And there are serious engineering, organizational, and economic issues entailed in building the auxiliary systems of a hydrogen economy that go far beyond the scope of the DOE.

Conclusion

So what of the “Sputnik moment” and Chu’s formula for America’s energy calculus? This crisis is not a discrete, galvanizing event amenable to a quick fix, but part of a broader historical process of adapting an economy based largely on the technology and social relations of the previous century to rapidly changing circumstances in the new one. One can’t fault the secretary for demanding more money for “scientific R&D.” We expect him to do that as chief of an agency dedicated to such activities. But “scientific R&D” and the patents that are its proximate product cannot by themselves form the basis of national recovery because the great ideas that inform technological innovation and industrial manufacturing, like, say, giant magnetoresistance or lithium manganese spinel energy storage, can originate anywhere in the world (France, Germany, and South Africa, respectively). The historian David Edgerton has long argued this point, one recently illustrated by W. Patrick McCray in his history of the commercialization of giant magnetoresistance.

And so it is unrealistic to shoulder the DOE with the lion’s share of the burden of easing energy innovations into the marketplace. True, there is a long record of and justification for federal intervention in the American economy. But students of history might point out that if U.S. business and government leaders were serious about creating millions of new high-tech jobs in green energy, they would augment science and technology policies by protecting manufacturing. After all, they would only be playing by rules followed by all countries in achieving industrial liftoff, including Japan, China, and, back in the day, Britain and the United States of America.

There are, however, no easy answers. Up to 60 percent of Chinese exports to the United States are actually produced by American companies. Yet some form of protection combined with long-term federal countercyclical spending are likely the most effective ways to spur a national energy renaissance. Of course, such options aren’t likely to be pursued anytime soon. In the United States, the chief instrument of industrial policy appears to devolve from currency manipulation. Encouraged by the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve has maintained interest rates near zero and flooded the market with cheap credit, resulting in a decline in the value of the dollar that some believe will allow the United States to export its way out of the recession. Given the understandable reluctance of Asian governments to open their markets any more than necessary, this seems wishful thinking.

In America’s current political climate, boosting science spending will be far cheaper and simpler than dealing with such complexities. For that reason, it will likely be the default response in the energy race.

Matthew N. Eisler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SES 0531184 and SES 0938099. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Further reading

Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean-Energy Economy (Washington: Island Press, 2008).

David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

Neal Lane, “The Grand Challenges of Nanotechnology,” Journal of Nanoparticle Research 3 (2001): 95–103.

Gijs Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations In the Automobile Age (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Reuters, “LG Chem sees more battery orders for GM’s Volt in 2011,” November 13, 2010, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AD00220101114.

Joseph J. Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming – the Solution and the Politics – and What We Should Do (New York: William Morrow, 2007).

Richard H. Schallenberg, Bottled Energy: Electrical Engineering and the Evolution of Chemical Energy Storage (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982).

For those wondering why the x-axis jumps to 11.1°C, I emailed Hansen that very question, and he explains, “the numbers on the far right and far left of the color scale give the most extreme value that occurs in that particular (set of) map(s).”

It’s no surprise that new colors and extended ranges are need, given the accelerated Arctic warming we’ve been seeing.  As I reported in January, Canada sees staggering mildness as planet’s high-pressure record is “obliterated”:

Surface temperature anomalies for the period 17 December 2010 to 15 January 2011 show impressive warmth across the Canadian Arctic….

The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.

The NSF-sponsored researchers at UCAR/NCAR posted some staggering data on just how warm it has been in northern Canada:

To put this picture into even sharper focus, let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011, as reported by Environment Canada…

• After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high.
• On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average.
• On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March.

Both NOAA and NASA data showing 2010 tied with 2005 for hottest year on record.  As meteorologist and former NOAA Hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground reported last November, “The year 2010 now has the most national extreme heat records for a single year–nineteen. These nations comprise 20% of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth’s surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record.”

NASA may have added pink to their maps, but the climate situation has been code-red for a while.

Joe Romm is the Editor of Climate Progress and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This is cross-posted at Climate Progress.

The islands, populated by 263 hardy souls, have no airport, and the sea voyage to reach them takes nearly a week from Cape Town, South Africa, roughly 1,500 miles to the east. They are the needle in the haystack that is the South Atlantic Ocean. So the chance that a freighter, not bound for the islands’ port, would somehow manage to run aground was as slim as the islands are tiny. And yet, there are now approximately 300,000 gallons of crude oil spoiling what had been one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet. To put this event in perspective, recall the spill that occurred in San Francisco bay in 2007 when the cargo ship Cosco Busan collided with a bridge abutment, spilling approximately 58,000 gallons of its fuel oil—less than 20 percent of what was released on Nightingale Island.

Spills of this magnitude happen all too often. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office found that from 1990 to 2005 there were 51 oil spills from vessels in U.S. waters causing damages exceeding $1 million. The cost of the Cosco Busan spill has not yet been determined, but estimates place the amount in the neighborhood of $60 million.

The same report found that the three main factors affecting the cost of a spill are remoteness of location, the type of oil spilled, and the time of year the spill occurs. Clearly, locations don’t get more remote than Nightingale Island. And crude like the kind spilled in this case is described by the GAO’s report as likely to impose “severe environmental impacts” and harm “waterfowl and fur-bearing mammals through coating and ingestion.” Which brings us back to Nightingale’s reputation as an avian paradise. Tragically, this event also checked the timing box, as many of the birds that nest on the island are molting, meaning they’re spending more time on shore, preening their feathers—one of the behaviors that causes them to ingest oil.

Dr. David Guggenheim, commonly referred to as the “Ocean Doctor,” was at the midway point of his Cape to Cape Expedition and arrived at Nightingale Island the night before the spill. He and his crew were in position to jump directly into the recovery effort, and he has since returned to the U.S. to tell the story and plead his case for assistance. As of April 3, about 5,000 oiled birds had been transported to Tristan da Cunha from Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands, but many more are still waiting to be rescued.

The immediate concern about the situation at Nightingale Island is the effect the oil will have on the “uncountable” number of birds, including half the world’s population of the endangered Northern Rockhopper Penguin. There’s also the question of whether rats—frequent stowaways on cargo vessels and the proverbial first to leave a sinking ship—may have found their way from the hold to the shore. As a non-native species on Nightingale with no natural predators, rats could devastate the ecosystem if they manage to establish a population.

The bigger take-home lesson is that once again we have proven no spot on the planet, no matter how remote, is safe from the dangerous risks of our fossil fuel economy. As a culture, we have become inured to the constant occurrence of oil spills. On average, three times per year oil spilled from ships causes more than a million dollars in damage to our coastlines, but unless that accident happens in the harbor of one of the world’s most environmentally conscious cities, or the sheer magnitude of the spill exceeds anything we have ever experienced, no one bats an eye.

For the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha who proudly tout their existence “far from the madding crowd in the South Atlantic Ocean” and for the endangered seabirds of Nightingale Island, this spill is the tragedy of a lifetime. For the rest of us, it’s little more than business as usual.

National Geographic Photographer Andrew Evans arrived on Nightengale Island shortly after the spill occurred. Watch the video he put together:

Michael Conathan is the Director of Oceans Policy and Lee Hamil is an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team.

Japan’s recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it caused together killed 9,737 people and left an additional 16,501 missing. The destruction left millions homeless and caused almost $200 billion in damage.

These natural disasters caused severe damaged to 4 of the 6 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving them without functioning primary, secondary, or tertiary cooling systems. The resulting partial meltdown of the core at one reactor and of a waste fuel rod storage tank in another has resulted in the release of radioactive material into the atmosphere, soil, and water, forcing the evacuation of what was at first a 12-mile radius and now a 19-mile radius surrounding the facility.

Though reactors in the United States are built to strict safety standards, they are nevertheless vulnerable to any number of natural and manmade disasters, from earthquakes and tsunamis to flash floods, droughts, and hurricanes. U.S. reactor safety standards have been effective in preventing catastrophe, though a recent report highlights 14 “near misses” where improperly implemented safety protocols nearly caused major problems. More troublingly, many of these standards were based on an understanding of our climate system that is now 40 years out of date. Today we know that climate change is making floods, droughts, and hurricanes stronger and more frequent, which means we must ask whether our safety standards, even when followed perfectly, are enough to prevent disaster.

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough review of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Current state of US nuclear plant safety

The United States currently has 104 functioning power reactors at 65 sites around the country, roughly a quarter of which use the same “Mark 1” containment vessel design used in the failing Japanese reactors. They supply roughly 20 percent of the country’s total electricity needs. Nuclear plants demand large sources of water in order to cool and control the core temperatures of the reactors that power them. To meet this inevitable requirement, nuclear plants are situated in low-lying areas near rivers and lakes, and many others are built on the coasts. This proximity leaves these plants vulnerable to floods and other water-related disasters.  (See our map below.)

(click for a high res version.)

Many regulations are already in place to ensure that nuclear energy remains safe from floods, surges, tsunamis, and droughts. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, oversees licensing applications, reactor specifications, and radioactive waste disposal. The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, or ACRS, also reviews the adequacy of proposed safety standards and creates individualized specifications to withstand the projected worst-case disasters for each plant location. Nuclear facilities are initially granted a 40-year license that must be renewed after 20 years. They then have the opportunity to extend their license for additional 20-year increments.

The problem is that our nuclear reactors are all old. Thirty years old on average in fact, since political will for new nuclear reactors has weakened since the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. Seven operating reactors have eclipsed their original 40 year lifespans and been permitted to operate for another 20 years. This makes them vulnerable to problems, like stronger floods caused by climate change, about which we had considerably less knowledge three to four decades ago when the plants were built.

Climate change will increase certain risks

Climate change will compound existing weather-related risks. In the years since most of our nuclear reactors were built, we’ve learned that climate change is increasing the risk profile of many kinds of extreme weather. Two scientific studies published this year in Nature have supported this. Large and destructive floods once thought likely to happen only once in 100 years on average are now expected to happen every 20 years: a five-fold increase. Similar trends hold for droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires. Droughts and heat waves can impact nuclear reactors because they use large amounts of water in the power generation process. If water levels drop too low, or the temperature of adjacent water bodies rises too high, the ability of the reactors to operate can be impaired. Sea-level rise is also of particular concern, since many of our nuclear facilities are located on the coast.

In response to this growing awareness of disasters that can result from climate change, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, released a safety guide in 2003 detailing flood-related hazards to nuclear power plants on coastal and river sites. The safety guide suggests that newly constructed plants should account for several consequences of climate change over the lifespan of the plant:

• Rise in mean sea level: 35-85 cm
• Rise in air temperature: 1.5-5 ⁰C
• Rise in sea or river temperature: 3 ⁰C
• Increase in wind strength: 5-10 percent
• Increase in precipitation: 5-10 percent

Higher sea levels, in combination with the warmer air, water, and sea temperatures will produce larger, stronger waves, increase the flow rate of rivers, and alter the dominant wind patterns, according to the report. The IAEA recommendations offer a good framework for assessing siting of new nuclear facilities, but current safety standards at the 104 operating nuclear reactors in the United States remain in question. Are they sufficient to deal with the increased risks caused by climate change?

This is a question we must answer, and soon. As we have written at Science Progress before, climate change creates considerable uncertainty for businesses and governments who must make difficult decisions that will affect the way we do business over the next 10, 20, or 40 years. In making long-term decisions about policy and business, decision makers need to have all the data they can get. The problem is that extremely rare events by definition provide us with little opportunity for study, even though their impacts can be catastrophic.

The seawalls at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, for example, were designed to withstand an 18-foot wave, though the tsunami that caused the eventual nuclear meltdown was estimated to have been more than 40 feet high. Japanese engineers simply didn’t have enough data to accurately predict just how big a tsunami could be. Could this happen in the United States? For reference, the San Onofre reactor in California is built right on Pacific coast, with a sea wall of only 23 feet.

The bottom line is that sometimes, what we think to be a “worst case” scenario is not really the worst case. Just because there is uncertainty about how climate and weather will affect our nuclear reactors does not mean we should ignore the issue. Quite the opposite; it would be negligent to ignore this uncertainty as we continue to assess our nation’s nuclear safety standards.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken some steps to incorporate current climate science into its standards, but it has not gone far enough. In 2009, the NRC released an information notice that suggested plants re-evaluate flood protection measures, but they did not require action. To make matters worse, the guidelines in use were established in 1977, with the latest updates occurring in 1984. As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough assessment of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Countries around the world have already begun to take increased risks from climate change into account in their nuclear safety protocols.  It’s high time the United States follows suit. The United Kingdom has insisted that new nuclear plants demonstrate countermeasures taken to prevent damage from more extreme floods, France has begun reviewing all 58 of its reactors to check how much flooding they can handle, and Austria has even called for nuclear “stress tests” similar to those banks undergo. Germany has even ordered all reactors built prior to 1980 (all American reactors would qualify) to be shut down for three months.

The disaster in Japan has afforded the United States the opportunity to re-examine the safety of its own fleet of nuclear reactors. Given how often we underestimate the “worst-case” scenario, this is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor for Science Progress, Elaine Sedenberg is an Intern with Science Progress, and Matt Woelfel is an Intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team. The authors would like to thank Kate Gordon, Richard Caperton, and Valeri Vasquez, and Evan Hansleigh for their invaluable contributions to the article.

Illustrations of this challenge occurred in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona this past month. Record cold temperatures in Texas and New Mexico contributed to a series of technological failures in the region’s natural gas pipelines that ultimately led to electricity blackouts in Texas, a complete shutdown of natural gas supply in many areas of New Mexico for close to a week, and the shutdown of seven gas-fired electricity-generating plants in Arizona. While the exact causes of these events are yet to be determined, they illustrated the brittleness of the pipeline system in the face of unexpected climatic conditions as well as the challenge of bringing the pipeline system back online once it had failed.

Another illustration from the Southwest involves ongoing water shortages in the Colorado river system. Lake Mead, from which Las Vegas draws the bulk of its water supply, sits at record-low water levels. Further reductions in water levels would cause the water to drop below the level of the pipeline that takes water to Las Vegas. To prevent that, rules governing the allocation of Colorado river water would kick in and significantly reduce water availability to users in the region. In the short term, water managers will probably allow water to flow into Lake Mead from upstream reservoirs rather than implementing water restrictions. But if ongoing drought in the region continues or escalates, water restrictions for the region’s agriculture are likely to come sooner rather than later.

Infrastructure reform has received high-profile attention in Washington, D.C., in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers report on the state of U.S. infrastructure described the serious degradation of the economy’s technological foundations. President Obama called for significantly increased infrastructure funding in his State of the Union address, and the administration’s FY 2012 budget released this week includes funding for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, adapting infrastructure to the challenges of climate change has received little attention in this conversation. To be sure, the National Academies spilled some ink on the topic in its recently released series of reports on “America’s Climate Choices.” Nonetheless, engineers, policymakers, and the public remain largely unaware of the significant challenges ahead.

Now is the time to begin a serious conversation about climate change and the future of the nation’s and the world’s engineered systems. When we upgrade the country’s infrastructure, climate change must be front and center in our engineering, policy, and business—not only because of the need to think systematically about how infrastructure contributes to carbon dioxide emissions but also because the world is committed to at least modest climate change, no matter how fast we reduce atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases. Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Even so, its devastation of New Orleans highlighted the risks of extreme weather events that exceed the design parameters of technological infrastructures. We are now entering an era where climatic patterns may systematically drift outside the designed operating conditions of many of our most critical systems.

One last point: Infrastructure transformation is not simply an engineering problem or a finance problem. As Boston’s “Big Dig” project made clear, reengineering major infrastructural systems in place requires a new kind of engineering—and a new level of collaboration between leaders in engineering and other societal institutions—that recognizes the social, political, and economic dimensions of technological systems. The country needs engineers, policymakers, business leaders, and citizens who understand the infrastructure challenges we face and who are prepared to work together through the difficult challenges of redesigning and reengineering some of the most complex sociotechnological systems on the planet.

Clark A. Miller is associate director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University.

Some dismiss Ray Kurzweil as a quack. His predictions of a future sound like plotlines from the nuttiest sci-fi films. According to Kurzweil’s theories, by around 2029 information technology will become more sophisticated than the human brain, and by 2045 what he calls “the Singularity” will occur—information technology will have advanced to the point at which people can become immortal by downloading their consciousness onto nanobots, which can race around the world and infuse other bodies or inanimate objects with human consciousness.

Kooky sounding indeed. Last week, however, at the D.C. premiere of ‘Transcendent Man,’ hundreds of people gathered to hear Ray Kurzweil and see a documentary about him and his theories. While this may sound more like science fiction than actual science, the man did invent the musical synthesizer, created a device that uses optical character recognition to help blind people read, predicted the year and month in which a computer would defeat a human at chess, and has 17 Ph.Ds. Kurzweil has even received the National Medal of Technology, the highest medal the president can bestow for pioneering new technologies, from three separate U.S. presidents. So let’s not dismiss him just yet.

Kurzweil has studied the progression of information technology since the dawn of time, noticing that the rate of technological innovation tends to proceed in an exponential fashion. Based on Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Kurzweil’s studies find that the capacity and speed of information technology has doubled about every two years and he believes it will continue to do so. Adding to this, Kurzweil notes how many industries, from retail to genomic medicine to manufacturing, are beginning to function more and more like information technologies.

For example, scientists working in labs across the world can email whole genomes back and forth, and then “print” them out using ever-cheaper, ever-faster DNA sequencers. With the rise of 3D printing, Kurzweil asserts that the day is not far off when one can simply download a blouse or a solar panel from the Internet and “print” it out at home. With exponentially accelerating information technology influencing innovation in so many fields, Kurzweil posits that technological advancement will accelerate at asymptotic speeds, so fast that the human mind will be incapable of understanding it.

But Kurzweil’s theory is centered around the human relationship to technology only. It is unclear how these speculative technological changes would affect the human relationship to nature. If nanobots will be able to repair our bodies from within so that humans do not have to age or get sick or get fat or starve, does it even matter if global warming and environmental degradation destroys ecosystems and warms our planet to the point of disrupted food chains and massive environmental disasters?

When I spoke with Kurzweil last week, I asked him about this, specifically how climate change and the environment fits into his theory. (You can hear the whole interview at the link here.) He responded that stopping climate change matters because many millions of people will suffer if we don’t. He continued:

I have a whole thesis on resources. … it’s really only these exponentially growing information technologies that have a scale to address problems like energy and the environment. … right now solar energy is actually a half of a percent of the world’s energy but it’s doubling every two years and has been for 20 years, so it’s only eight doublings away … which is 16 years, from meeting 100 percent of the world’s energy needs. … do we have enough sunlight to do that? Yes, we have 10,000 times more than we need.

Kurzweil’s theories are rooted in a fierce optimism. For him technology is the answer to the world’s most difficult challenges, namely suffering and death, and as demonstrated by his answers to my questions, climate change and environmental degradation. But his rhetoric and discussion are maybe too optimistic and too easy. He is concerned with the what, namely what happened with technology development in the past and what will happen in the future. But he glosses over the how. It is precisely the how that we need to concentrate on now.

Technology will not just double itself. As Bracken Hendricks and I have written in a report on clean energy deployment for the Center for American Progress:

It is critical to remember that Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It is a law of markets. Capturing this opportunity to make clean technology cheap requires a clear assessment of the real barriers in the market today. … the combined public and private investments [in communications technology, for instance] created tremendous public value while giving birth to a brand new industry. Predictability in the market made this possible. That is just what is missing for clean energy today.

Like Moore’s Law, Kurzweil’s concept of exponential technological development is not a law of physics. I am also optimistic about the potential of clean technology but it will not develop in a vacuum. If technology is to solve our energy and climate problems, it will require massive amounts of capital from the private and public sectors to accelerate innovation and scale up clean energy deployment. This is why the United States needs a concerted and cohesive clean technology innovation policy effort that provides policy incentives to help clean energy projects attract private investment.

We must pick up where Kurzweil’s theory leaves off and look into the mechanics of how public policy can be used to build an American economy that runs on clean energy. This means enacting policies to eliminate market barriers that prevent clean energy technologies from competing fairly with incumbent fossil technology, and ending perverse subsidies for ancient, outdated, and environmentally destructive industries like coal and oil. You can read a more detailed list of policy proposals to accelerate clean energy deployment in a Center for American Progress report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.”

We live in a time in which premature deaths are accelerated by pollution and environmental degradation, and global climate change threatens the very future of all mankind. If these trends continue, we face a potentially dismal future. It may be a stretch to say technology innovation alone will solve these problems. Kurzweil is right, however, in that our ability to use clean technology will be crucial to solving climate change and our energy challenges, and will relieve many millions of people of suffering along the way.

Kurzweil’s vision for the future reminds us that, unhampered by market externalities, regulatory barriers, and competition from the entrenched infrastructure of the past, the clean energy economy has the potential to grow exponentially and meet our needs. With the right policy incentives, Kurzweil’s unrelenting optimism should inspire us to believe that a future free of climate change and fossil-fuel addiction is well within our reach.

Lisbeth Kaufman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.” A version of this article also appears on Pluck Magazine, a great new online magazine featuring young adult voices on the changing of culture, society, and career paths in the 21st century.

Following the devastation of last week’s 9.0 scale earthquake and tsunami, Japanese citizens face new realities and threats stemming from damage to nuclear power plant facilities. The quake damaged five nuclear reactors, three of which are facing potential meltdowns due to coolant loss. The human and environmental cost of such an event could be cataclysmic.

This catastrophe in Japan should serve as a lesson to the United States as well as Japan. The featured map illustrates just how vulnerable we could be: many of the United States’s 104 nuclear facilities are located near areas of seismic activity.

This catastrophe in Japan should serve as a lesson to the United States as well as Japan, argued Joe Romm, editor of Climate Progress, and CAPAF policy analyst Richard Caperton in this CNN article today.

The featured map illustrates just how vulnerable we could be: many of the United States’s 104 nuclear facilities are located near areas of seismic activity. We need to make sure that we are taking steps to secure our aging nuclear infrastructure against earthquakes and other environmental disasters and that the risks of potential accidents are fairly bone not just by tax payers, but by those who profit from producing nuclear power. Specifically, Romm and Caperton make four suggestions to policymakers moving forward:

• Review the ability of every reactor to deal with threats to its safety. The “Japan Syndrome” — a major disaster causing loss of coolant that threatens a meltdown — means we must make sure that reactors in coastal or seismic areas can withstand any disaster. Many disasters can imperil reactors. For example, severe floods are becoming more common. As FEMA head Craig Fugate said in December after all the record-smashing deluges around the globe, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” Every reactor that is in a 500-year flood plain should demonstrate that it can handle the challenge.
• Congress must not cut funding for NOAA’s tsunami warning service. House Republicans have proposed cutting funding to NOAA — the agency directly responsible for tsunami monitoring and warning — restricting the government’s ability to respond. America has a number of reactors that could be affected by a tsunami, such as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California. Many more are at risk from a major earthquake.
• The permitting process must not be further weakened. Today, new reactors must undergo a multiyear review process before they are given a “Combined Operating License”. This is already an accelerated permitting process — in which multiple reviews are conducted simultaneously. It mustn’t be sped up yet again.
• The Department of Energy must continue to run the nuclear loan guarantee program to protect taxpayers and must continue to accurately charge the nuclear industry for the risk it incurs by guaranteeing these projects. To receive a loan guarantee, a builder has to pay a fee to compensate taxpayers for taking on significant risk. If DOE collects too little money, taxpayers bear too much risk. The nuclear industry has claimed that these fees are too high, despite evidence to the contrary. Congress must not interfere with DOE’s critical role in taxpayer protection.

Update: The magnitude of the quake was recently revised upwards by the U.S. Geological Survey to a 9.0. The change has been made in the text.

Update: Since publishing this feature, another explosion at Japans Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Facility has caused further damage, resulting in the evacuation of rescue workers and increased risk of a catastrophic meltdown. The New York Times has the story.

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In The Inquisition of Climate Science, former Reed College president and National Science Board member James Powell elucidates the landscape of climate denial; diagrams, analyzes, and debunks the most frequently used denier arguments; and advances a progressive vision for what science communication could become in the 21st century. Prepublication reviewers summed up the book: “A devastating, crushing blow against the deniers. I would not want to meet Powell in a dark alley.”

At once a quick read and an informational reference guide, The Inquisition of Climate Science is a must for climate science advocates as well as casual readers. Powell’s meticulous research makes the book a useful all-in-one guide to the science, politics, messages, and media coverage of climate change. At the same time, his engaging narrative style grabs the reader and makes the pages seem to fly by.

From the very first chapter, The Inquisition makes crystal clear the distinction between science and pseudoscience, and arms the reader with the tools to dispel common misconceptions. Powell opens the book with accounts of two dichotomous climate change conferences that exemplify the difference between legitimate, fact-based debate, and political demagoguery. The first, held by the American Geophysical Union, consisted of presentations by scientists about new data and findings about climate change.

In contrast, the second conference, organized by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, had a very different goal. Rather than bringing together scientists to discuss science using scientific evidence, the Heartland conference brought together “scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives” to repeat a set of talking points about the dangers of “climate alarmism.” Not only were no peer-reviewed scientific findings presented at the conference, but almost none of the speakers were published climate scientists. Instead, the Heartland Institute invited such figures as a former astronaut, the president of the Czech Republic, and an MIT meteorologist, almost the sole speaker to be a practicing scientist.

What Powell shows with such clarity is that the so-called climate “debate” is not a scientific one. In example after example he illustrates the lopsided nature of the climate discourse: with scientists using scientific evidence on one side, and political activists using knee-jerk imagery and philosophical misdirection on the other. In his analysis, Powell breaks down some of the most common hallmarks of the denier movement. “They:

• Engage in publicity stunts designed to gain media attention and that promulgate disinformation.
• Repeat claims long after scientists have shown them to be false.
• Make assertions without presenting any evidence to back them up. Had a speaker at the AGU meeting said that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, the audience would have demanded to see the evidence.
• Have no scientific findings that falsify global warming.
• Have opposed global warming for twenty years. True, back then, many scientists were also skeptical, but as the evidence mounted, they changed their minds. Deniers do not change their minds, a sure sign that they base their denial not on science, but on ideology. To paraphrase Richard Lindzen, ‘global warming denial has always been about politics, not science.’”

The book also examines the connections between antiscience front groups and the fossil fuel interests that fund them. And with rigorous research, Powell shows how the same tactics of science denial have shown up again and again over the years, from the tobacco industry-orchestrated denial of the health effects of smoking, to groups who deny that HIV causes AIDS, to evolution denial, to the organized denial of the harmful health effects of toxic substances like asbestos and chromium hexafluoride.

The solution? In my interview with him, James Powell summed up his simple advice for scientists fighting for truth:

“It’s time for scientists to stand up and be counted. Not be reticent. Not be cautious. Not say for instance that there’s no way to tell whether Katrina was caused by global warming, but to say very forcefully that Katrina is exactly the kind of thing we can expect more of under global warming.”

Powell’s comprehensive book is a welcome addition to the growing literature debunking fossil fuel-funded, antiscience disinformation.

Sean Pool is assistant editor for Science Progress and Climate Progress. You can download or stream the whole interview above. You can order the forthcoming book here.

On October 6, Spanish wind giant Gamesa Corp Technologica SA, a leading global designer and manufacturer of wind turbines, and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, America’s largest shipbuilder, signed a research and development agreement to jointly develop two prototypes of what will be the world’s largest offshore wind turbine, known as G11X -5.0 MW. The prototypes will be built piecemeal and then deployed and tested for kinks in U.S. waters, likely off the Virginia Coast.

At five megawatts each, just one of these turbines running at full speed could power nearly 4,000 homes. The turbine also builds off of Gamesa’s recent incremental innovations that have made its previous designs operate more efficiently and cost-effectively. These include:

• Innoblade: a blade that has been divided into sections allowing it to be easily transported. It also includes new aerodynamic features to minimize noise.
• Multismart: a turbine control system modulating the pitch of each blade, reducing vibration and lessening load.
• ConcreTower: a tower made of steel and concrete with the aim of reducing costs and facilitating transportation.
• Flexifit: a crane coupled to the nacelle (the main housing for a wind turbine) that can hoist or lower components such as the drive train or generator.
• GridMate: a permanent magnet synchronous generator using a full converter, “to guarantee the compliance with grid connection regulations.”

Once a final design for the turbine and marine stabilization platform are finalized, Gamesa will build a manufacturing facility to mass-produce the equipment, creating hundreds of jobs, according a spokesperson. Gamesa was the first foreign turbine manufacturer to come to the United States and since then has established two turbine manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania that today sustain 800 permanent manufacturing jobs. Despite being a foreign-owned subsidiary, Gamesa’s U.S. operation has one of the highest domestic content rates (more than 50 percent) of any turbine maker in the country.

What’s more, on October 7, Interior Secretary Salazar finally approved the lease for the Cape Wind wind farm, bringing to a close the nine-year regulatory and political stalemate that had ensnared it. Cape Wind will deploy 130 turbines designed and built by Siemens Energy, and an agreement between Cape Wind Associates, LLC, Mass Tank Sales Corporation and EWW Group of Germany will result in the construction of first manufacturing facility for offshore wind foundations and other metalwork in the U.S., creating hundreds of jobs.  Cape Wind is the first of a handful of offshore wind projects currently winding their way through various local, state, and federal regulatory hurdles in search of approval. According to a third party analysis, the Cape Wind project will create between 600 and 1,000 construction and manufacturing jobs in the region while boosting labor income, state GDP, and increasing tax revenue by millions of dollars.

On October 12, Trans-Elect, a major transmission line developer, announced its intention to develop a subsea electrical transmission backbone that could one day connect and support the thousands of megawatts of offshore wind capacity being planned for development off the East Coast. This American Wind Connection would span 350 miles from northern New Jersey to the North Carolina/Virginia border and could support enough wind farms to power 1.9 million homes upon its completion in 2016. What is unique about this particular proposal is that its backers—Google; Marubeni Corp., a Japanese trading firm; and Good Energies LLC—have no plans to ask for a single federal dollar to finance the project. This indicates that offshore wind energy is approaching profitability and commercial readiness today.

At Science Progress we have written extensively about the formation of bottom-up innovation “clusters” or “ecosystems” around particular technologies in certain regions of the country. These networks are often anchored around a particular geographic location where shared infrastructure, favorable policy conditions, and a large pool of human talent can be leveraged by collaborating public and private entities. All of these recent announcements show the clear outlines of what could be the kernel of an offshore wind technology innovation cluster anchored in the Northeast and extending across the country.

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are particularly well-suited to serve as a cradle for a new offshore wind innovation ecosystem thanks to of a host of region-specific assets. These include:

• The availability of a vast amount of potential offshore wind resources (over 60,000 megawatts).
• A shallow coastal shelf that extends miles out to sea. These shallow waters make it cheaper and easier to install large turbines further out to sea where they can harness stronger and more consistent ocean winds while remaining virtually out of sight.
• Close proximity to large population centers where the power can be used, day or night.

Innovation networks form when different types of firms in an industry collaborate, create shared objectives, and exchange money, knowledge, and risk in the pursuit of those objectives. This can happen through a joint agreement for technical collaboration and development between companies with R&D operations, such as that of Gamesa and Northrop Grumman; through an economic exchange between buyer and seller, such as Siemen’s sale of 130 of its turbines to Cape Wind; or through advancing an investment in infrastructure, such as Google’s intention to take a stake in the development of the American Wind Connection.

All of these interactions exemplify the kind of collaboration among technology researchers, producers, users, and financiers that is so essential to the formation of a functional innovation ecosystem. New project finance expertise will be developed as Google, Good Energies, and Marubeni Corp. work with Trans-Elect to piece together the first-of-its-kind multijurisdictional offshore transmission system. The infrastructure created by this collaboration will make it easier for project developers to accelerate construction of planned and future offshore wind farms in the Northeast, which in turn will drive demand for turbines and equipment designed and produced by Siemens, Gamesa, Northrop Grumman, General Electric, and others.

All of these activities will help to increase scale and decrease cost while creating jobs in the Northeast and in turbine component manufacturing plants around the country. According to a recent report published by Oceana, the offshore wind industry in the United States has the potential to create and sustain as many as 212,000 permanent American jobs annually by 2030. This is more than three times as many jobs as the American Petroleum Institute predicts could be created by aggressive expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling. This finding is consistent with an analysis released by CAP and the Political Economy Research Institute last year that showed a similar figure.

The offshore wind innovation milestones reached this week stand as a testament to the innovative power of America’s entrepreneurs and businesses but much more could be accomplished if the government were to take an active partnership role in this nascent innovation network. Innovation ecosystems thrive when private sector producers, users, financers, and researchers can collaborate closely with public sector regulators, program administrators, and policymakers to address both market and regulatory barriers to technology development.

While the preliminary accomplishments of the American Wind Connection, Cape Wind, and the Gamesa-Northrop partnership demonstrate the potential of America’s private sector to innovate, so much more would be possible if the federal government could articulate a remotely coherent offshore wind energy strategy. The federal government needs to address regulatory hurdles like ones that ensnared Cape Wind for decades.

Some steps have been taken, such as the formation of the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium among 10 Eastern states and the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the recent rulemaking by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which will make it easier to site new clean energy transmission lines like the American Wind Connection. But much more is needed and our economic competitors are beating us to the punch.

Earlier this year China beat the United States to join the offshore wind club alongside Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This puts China’s command-and-control economy fully two years ahead of the United States in offshore wind, since the first U.S. wind farm, Cape Wind, will not be complete until 2012 at the earliest. (see chart)

(Data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, p. 42.)

As technologies like offshore wind advance along the innovation lifecycle toward commercialization and maturity, mobilizing large amount of private capital becomes a paramount objective. But private capital won’t flow where there is no return, so besides collaborating to clear away regulatory hurdles, it must also sustain policies to keep demand for clean energy technologies strong.

Until now, the states have carried the burden of implementing demand-driving renewable energy standards in a piecemeal fashion, and these policies have been instrumental in helping the wind industry increase scale and reduce costs as much as it has. But in our current environment of political uncertainty and state budget shortfalls, this patchwork of policies is in jeopardy. The job then falls to the federal government to provide the regulatory clarity and long-term policy certainty needed to keep big investors at the table financing innovation.

There is a lot of work to do but the events of the past week have shown that the building blocks are there to develop a job-creating innovation ecosystem for offshore wind energy in the American East. With a little federal leadership, America’s private sector is ready to bring its capital and expertise to the table to build the factories, wind farms, and research centers that will drive energy innovation into the future.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor at Science Progress.

President Barack Obama appointed former U.S. Navy Secretary and former Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus to “restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region.” Mabus’s task demands the full resources of the scientific community of the gulf region, as well as specialists from around the globe. What’s more, British oil giant BP will be held liable for damages resulting from the spill, but many of these damages will require scientific research in order to understand and quantify. Without coordinated leadership from the government, the ecosystems and communities of the gulf may be suffering damages without reparation for years.

To meet this challenge, the administration must establish a clearinghouse for gulf region science as soon as possible, led by a scientific leader like Dr. John Holdren, the Presidential Science Adviser, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director, or Dr. Subra Suresh, the incoming director of the National Science Foundation. This effort must have a clear sense of urgency, with flexibility for rapid response. In the words of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute director Deborah Brosnan, we need a “science war room” for the Gulf of Mexico, including “ecologists, wildlife biologists, oceanographers, fisheries scientists, toxicologists and ecological economists.”

This gulf research war room should be an interagency effort, including NOAA, the Department of Interior (National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and Fish & Wildlife Service), Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Energy, NASA, and state agencies. The initial actions of the federal government to comprehend this catastrophe are a good foundation for such a coordinated effort:

Funding research: The National Science Foundation has taken the lead in soliciting academic research on the BP spill, requesting proposals for grants from its Rapid Response Research program on May 27. Since then, NSF has already awarded 44 grants worth nearly $5 million. Funding for this national priority should be multiplied at least a hundredfold and billed to BP. Program leadership should rapidly and transparently establish a strategic mission and a process for utilizing the best science to direct remediation efforts.

Data publication: The government has begun the effort of compiling and publishing the reams of scientific data relevant to the BP disaster online. Data.Gov/restorethegulf links to dozens of datasets and agency websites. GeoPlatform.Gov/gulfresponse includes multiple layers of geospatial data. All the data being collected by the government, BP contractors, and the academic community on this disaster should be brought together as rapidly and transparently as possible.

Scientific symposia: The government has begun convening scientific symposia on the BP spill. On May 27, Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, and the University of New Hampshire Coastal Response Research Center convened a meeting to “study dispersant use and ecosystem impacts of dispersed oil.” NOAA, NSF, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership (a group of oceanographic institutions) held an emergency Gulf Oil Spill Scientific Symposium on June 2 and 3 at Louisiana State University. Lubchenco outlined the work NOAA is conducting, as did USGS director Marcia McNutt. Clear lines of inquiry should be established for future conferences, and much greater outreach needs to be made to the scientific community.

One of the most critical roles for the gulf research war room will be the long-term monitoring of health impacts of this toxic event. Center for American Progress health experts Ellen-Marie Whelan and Lesley Russell recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary for health “be designated to launch and oversee the coordinated response plan implemented whenever a situation arises that can threaten public health.” The assistant secretary  “would have responsibility for ensuring—in conjunction with other federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and the private sector—that needed services are delivered and information is collected, and that data, information, and resources are transferred to the responsible HHS agency or agencies.”

In the wake of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, criticism was leveled against the oil company and the federal response for ignoring the need to do long-term monitoring of health effects of the toxic spill. The government should learn from these mistakes.

The leader of this public effort must face the challenging but critical task of resolving conflicts with the scientific investigations now enmeshed with the foreign oil giant BP. As established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, BP is liable for any damages to public natural resources, and government officials are now working with BP contractors on the natural resource damage assessment process, as required by 15 CFR 990.14(c). But quantifying exactly what those damages are will require unbiased scientific research.

BP is hiring as many scientists as possible to join its private contractor army and influence the research. The U.S. government must move quickly to protect the integrity of this process.

How quickly? Well, BP already is doling out grants from its $500 million Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, a Tobacco Institute-like program managed by a BP-picked panel to disburse scientific research grants in the coming years. In an environment of declining federal funding for the sciences, many research institutions have become dependent on private sources of financing to fund their research, and many are clamoring to get a piece of BP’s money. Louisiana State University, University of Florida’s Florida Institute of Oceanography, and Mississippi State University’s Northern Gulf Institute have already accepted $10 million each.

Currently, there is no mechanism to ensure that this BP-funded research remains impartial to the interests of the funder. In a foreshadowing of future conflicts, the Obama administration stands accused of “political intervention” for attempting to establish even moderate oversight over BP’s private slush fund. BP’s emerging control of the science behind its own natural resource damage assessment and resulting liability stinks of the same self-regulation that helped cause this disaster in the first place. It is the responsibility of the federal government to act on behalf of the public good and protect the integrity and transparency of the science surrounding the gulf disaster.

The Senate should take note of this pressing need as they debate a new oil regulation package over the coming week.

Brad Johnson is the Think Progress Climate Editor at the Center for American Progress.

Small companies are the nation’s primary drivers of job creation. A few of today’s small companies will grow to become our next 21^st century Googles and Genentechs. These young companies could become the next big publicly traded companies on the cutting edge of innovation, and many more could become the not-as-big but just as prosperous companies with the ability to raise equity and debt capital to expand their businesses and job opportunities. This kind of “bottom-up” innovation and entrepreneurial company creation is what defines our unique U.S. venture capital-driven economy, the world’s top performer that over the past several decades produced tremendous results.

But something important has changed since then—the pool of venture capital is dramatically smaller today, crimping the creation of new ideas into new businesses ready to hire Americans by the score. The headline in a recent Wall Street Journal article tells the tale: “Venture Capital Could Shrivel Away” because “fund raising has now come to a near halt.”

Indeed, in a recent presentation in the National Venture Capital Association’s Venture Capital Industry Update, October 14, 2009, NVCA president Mark Heeson shows that the steady, though historically slow, growth in VC fundraising from 2002 to 2007 began a considerable decline in 2008 such that the VC industry is at a new and much lower level.

Why is venture capital fundraising important to jobs growth? Well, a recent NVCA report shows that:

“In 2008, venture capital-backed companies employed more than 12 million people and generated nearly $3 trillion in revenue. Respectively, these figures accounted for 11 percent of private sector employment and represented the equivalent of 21 percent of U.S. GDP during that same year. These findings extend trends regarding venture capital’s outsized impact – or “ripple effect” – on the U.S. economy that stretch back to the first edition of this report, published in 2001.”

The upshot: Our nation’s unique strength, its venture capital industry, is in danger of drying up just when we need it the most.

Yet equity capital for small business remains key to growing the competitive companies that can create the millions of jobs we need for broad-based economic prosperity. Without equity capital, jobs will lag and the jobless recovery will continue. America needs to focus on jobs-ready, entrepreneurial-driven companies by providing equity capital for their growth. And yes, the federal government can help.

Today there is a special opportunity for the federal government to have a significant impact on job creation by joining forces in a public-private venture capital partnership. Together, the private and public sectors can invest equity in competitive, jobs-ready businesses—equity that can also enable other private and public sector debt financing for small businesses to work more effectively.

Before detailing how this public-private partnership would work, let’s first listen to what the co-founder of one of the 20^th century’s most successful venture capital-backed companies sees as the key problem plaguing jobs growth in our nation today. Andy Groves, Intel Corp.’s co-founder, CEO and chairman, recently in Bloomberg Businessweek pinpointed the strategic decline in jobs creation in the United States. He says our economy is suffering from the ability to take technology “from prototype to mass production.” Grove rightly notes:

“This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter. The scaling process is no longer happening in the United States.”

He’s right, of course. Jobs and scaling are two sides of the same coin. And it’s the equity capital piece, the most powerful driver in jobs creation, that’s missing from public discussion about how to solve the problem of America’s severe jobs problem. America has hundreds of these companies, all now job ready. It is these companies that equity capital can help and the ones that are ready to be a part of an American jobs strategy.

Here’s how an “equity jobs” program would work. Public and private venture capital funds would go directly to companies at the top of the list as potential jobs producers.  They would only go to companies that are ready to hire new employees to support their growth, whether the company employs only a handful of workers but is poised to launch a groundbreaking new product or service that can be quickly scaled up, or employs 300 hundred or more workers but needs the equity investment to expand their operations across the country or overseas, mostly likely in tandem with public and private debt financing, too.

As an investor, the federal government would be a limited partner in these funds, so all public money would be returned to the U.S. Treasury along with dividends as companies went public on U.S. stock exchanges or were acquired by other companies looking to expand their operations or tap new technologies with homegrown production. This would be a positive “double bottom line” for America.

Making this program churn out jobs would require a rigorous selection of savvy fund managers with track records of strength and quality of work. They would need to boast a variety of company building skills alongside financial and entrepreneurial acumen, but also the basic skills metrics of a good VC such as speed of exits, cash-on-cash returns, investment volume, and ability to build “home run” potential in their portfolios.

To provide investment services in regions in all 50 states, the program would employ 25 fund managers. Each would be required to show that they possess operational experience in firms with top quartile internal rate of return performance, and cumulative experience of ten years or more as board members of invested companies. Further they would have to demonstrate the capability to commit to and provide both return on investment and jobs creation outcome metrics.

The successful applicants would select jobs-ready companies on two key criteria. The first would be according to highest levels of order backlogs and current demand, one way venture investors select their most promising investments in companies close to “break out.” Consider an Orange County, CA-based technology company that recently failed to qualify for either bank or Small Business Administration financing because of lack of sufficient equity capital. The company, Applied Cardiac Systems, in business for 30 years, makes in America and sells worldwide its wireless devices to monitor heart functioning. Recently a change in government requirements of devices of this kind opened up a market of nearly $500 million. The company is a very strong global competitor in this market, and with adequate funding to support expansion, the company could scale up and add new local jobs. But the recent economic downturn reduced the company’s cash flow, disqualifying it for a loan. Equity capital is the only source of funds that can jumpstart this company’s growth.

Why is equity financing as a public policy priority so important to debt financing? Because the federal government right now is making strenuous efforts to direct debt capital to small businesses, but in many cases it isn’t working. Banks are reluctant to lend after the U.S. housing and financial crises, and banks are facing more stringent regulatory requirements precisely because of the lending excesses of the past decade. Elizabeth Warren, who overseas the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, for Congress says ”there’s no evidence that the $700 billion bailout boosted lending to small business.”

Warren is concerned that the market can’t find qualified companies and worries that the government incentives to lend are not strong enough. And in fact, banks are less willing to grant loans to small- and medium-sized companies. But with an infusion of equity capital these companies become much more promising credit risks. The key is equity capital, a way to address these issues and to provide growth capital to those companies that have a future potential and who have a strong backlog of business and need to hire.

The second investing criteria for these new public-private venture capital funds would be in market-ready products based on disruptive technologies that meet rapidly emerging global demand. Everyone in America knows the rags-to-riches stories of venture capital backed companies such as Google and Yahoo Inc., but there are many other companies like them who boost job growth every day in our country. Cases in point where equity has ignited world class companies:

• In 1987 Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital invested $2.5 million in data network gear maker, Cisco Systems Inc. for 30 percent ownership of the startup—within 10 years after going public Cisco employed 26,140 people.
• Ebay Inc. received $6.7 million from Benchmark Capital in 1997, which provided them the opportunity to go public in 1999, and then further expanded by purchasing Paypal, creating thousands of jobs.
• Intuit Inc. started with 2 guys working out of a modest apartment in Palo Alto, CA in 1983—venture backing helped it grow to $3.4 billion in revenues with approximately 7,800 employees today.

We need to support companies with disruptive technologies such as these—technologies that will define the 21^st century global economy—by ensuring adequate equity capital for entrepreneurs with breakthrough applications in alternative energy, clean energy technology, life science, medical technologies and personalized medicine, cybersecurity, and more. America has an abundant supply of these technologies just waiting to be commercialized at a scale that creates jobs upon jobs. We just need to find them, provide the capital they need, and help them grow and create those jobs.

Those who understand the direct connection between equity capital and jobs creation know they need to make it happen. In 2009 a House of Representatives’ committee passed the ‘‘Small Business Early-Stage Investment Act of 2009’’ (H.R. 3738) co-sponsored by Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) and Glenn Nye (D-VA) by voice vote that would establish an equity investment program for small business. Later almost identical sections appeared in the‘‘Small Business Financing and Investment Act of 2009’’ (H.R. 3854, Title VII), sponsored by Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), which built around the idea of serving certain small businesses needing equity investment because they had “attributes of being highly capital-intensive enterprises whose business models are generally not amenable to financing through lending programs.”

This bill passed the House of Representatives on October 29, 2009, by a vote of 389-32. Alas, the bill was sent to the Senate and referred to the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and its status as reported by Govtrack.us is “would seem to be abandoned.”

This year, however, a new bill, Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010

(HR 5297), sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) recently passed the House of Representatives with the main features of H.R. 3854, but with an increased equity funding level to $1 billion (HR 5297, Title III). A companion bill “The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010” (H.R. 5297), stripped, unfortunately, of any provisions for improving equity capital for small business, is now before the Senate.

All this legislative effort has been a step in the right direction, but all, alas, lack a direct focus on jobs creation. We need the new legislation to establish a program now that can create jobs through job-ready companies. We need to amend HR 5297 to include strong provisions for jobs creation. These provisions should establish our proposed public-private partnership venture capital program that will reflect a tested venture investment model that has been shown to be successful for decades.

The new program should learn best practices from successful state programs and also mirror federally implemented venture investment programs, and in particular, In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such a program would start the near-term creation of jobs now critically needed to bolster the U.S. economy.

And we can learn from the states. The Iowa Capital Investment Corporation, Utah Fund of Funds, Oregon Investment Fund, Invest Michigan, New Mexico Private Equity Program, and other state fund of funds initiatives show that equity capital attracts equity capital and accelerates company growth along with new jobs. Most funds are capitalized from $200 million to $400 million and target investment opportunities in venture capital and small buyout stage companies with growth characteristics across a range of sectors. The immediate effect of establishing the funds is to boost the amount of risk capital available to entrepreneurs.

Economics 101 defines capital formation as the creation of productive assets that expand an economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. In short, equity drives the economy. But it’s a paradox of sorts that though equity has mammoth power to drive the economy, the amount needed is relatively small. On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the first hour on the first trading day of a new year more money changes hands than VC’s invest in an entire year.

Now the nation is faced with a sea-change in the underlying structure of our economy and capital markets. Equity capital resources are shriveling at a time when more is needed. We need now to establish regional investment funds all across the United States with mandates to invest in jobs-ready companies. It would put funds to work immediately to help launch exciting new companies with disruptive technologies run by brilliant entrepreneurs, creating whole new industries. And it would enable older companies with high growth potential to work with banks to scale up and double and triple the number of their employees.

Today we must have access to and greater availability of equity financing because only a few hundred institutions and venture capital firms invest each year in the nation’s new companies, and that number is shrinking every year. We can make it happen with a national fund of funds that will serve every state and every region. Waiting in the wings for us to act are America’s best companies that will create 21^st century jobs and stop the jobless recovery.

Thomas Gephart is managing director of Catalyst Fund and founder and managing partner of Ventana Capital. As one of the first venture investors in San Diego and Orange County, he was a member of USC’s School of Engineering Board of Counselors for six years, working with new technologies and technology transfer. Currently, he advises multinational firms in search of innovative acquisitions.

Dan Loague is the Washington representative for Catalyst Funds. He is also a principal of Global Tech Exchange LLC, a company that provides technology commercialization consulting to venture capital and private equity investors, and executive director, Capital Formation Institute, Inc., a nonprofit organization serving a national network of leading seed and early stage investors, licensees, and commercialization professionals.

Weiss also includes a link to this set of handy conversion tables developed for the California Energy Commission. They provide guidelines on average car and home energy usage and power plant energy output, along with the corresponding average carbon dioxide emissions, which makes it easier to grasp the units involved. For instance, a typical power plant produces roughly the same amount of CO2 in a year as 340,000 cars:

Source: Tables to Convert Energy or CO2 (saved or used) to Familiar Equivalents

The pessimist argument goes like this: “economy, economy, economy.” Despite the significant economic benefits that will accrue from dealing with climate change—and the way in which new energy policies will boost the economy by creating domestic jobs and weaning us off foreign oil—regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are still too easily painted as a tax on the energy habits of ordinary Americans. Conservatives, in particular, can be expected to beat the hell out of any climate policy that they can spin as an unnecessary drag on the economy. Meanwhile, centrists are easily cowed by this same argument: After all, many Democratic Senators recently joined the GOP in voting to block the use of the budget reconciliation process to get a global warming bill through Congress without the threat of filibuster.

If matters really were so simple—and the “don’t wreck the economy” argument unbeatable—the political hurdles to passing meaningful climate legislation this year might indeed be insurmountable. Fortunately, that’s simply not the case.

Contrary to the pessimists, I prefer to view matters like this. While it will be an extremely difficult battle, there are nevertheless at least three key “knobs” that our leaders can turn, in fine tuning their climate policies, that will help them achieve legislative or policy victory. And if they get the bass, volume, and tone just right, they can still win.

The first “knob”—let’s label it “EPA”—regulates the extent to which administrative action will be employed to control global warming, either to achieve a non-legislative cap on emissions or simply to prompt congressional action. The more the Obama Environmental Protection Agency indicates that it’s simply going to regulate greenhouse gases on its own if Congress doesn’t move, the more Congress will feel pressured: After all, many fossil fuel companies won’t simply want to be left at EPA’s mercy. And thus far, EPA has moved rapidly indeed. It has already submitted an “endangerment finding”—the determination that carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act—to the White House, the first step toward regulatory action.

Yet there are multiple kinds of leverage available to the administration and to congressional policymakers. The second knob—let’s call it “auction”—would regulate the percentage of emissions permits that would initially be sold off under a cap and trade bill. Industry tends to complain about the economic disruptiveness of going immediately to a 100 percent auction, the Obama administration’s official goal. Centrist politicians inclined to sympathize with these companies could therefore be mollified by a tuning down of the initial auction percentage. Are there problems with this strategy? Definitely. We should get to a full auction as soon as possible. On the other hand, I’m convinced that political dynamics will change dramatically once we have an actual climate bill in place and there is no need to fight over it any more in the congressional arena. So there’s nothing wrong with using the “auction” knob to smooth the transition to a cap, provided the new law turns that knob up to the max with some rapidity (say, within 5 years).

And there’s one final knob, arguably the most powerful of all—labeled “dividend.” For the administration and congressional lawmakers can also “tune” the extent to which auction revenues go back to members of the public to help them cope with projections of higher energy costs. The more money average Americans receive back from the government under a new cap and trade bill, the more popular that bill will be, and the less possible it will be to paint it as an economic attack on the middle class. People simply won’t buy that argument as they go to the bank to cash their government checks.

Personally, then, I think the administration ought to turn the EPA knob to full throttle, tune down the auction knob as far as strategically possible, and crank up the dividend meter. And then, let’s all wait for the weather to change.

Summer is coming, the economy may (possibly) be improving, and you never know what the disrupted climate system itself could bring during the warmest time of the year. With events, politics can change very fast—and I still see the possibility, through the return of significant auction revenues to the public, of achieving a politically popular piece of legislation that will also set us on a path to saving the climate system.

Keep the faith.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

It’s also useful to consider projects like this in historical context—going back a century. Smartgrid projects will enable local, or distributed, generation of electricity, as consumers can tie their home solar panels into the grid or allow their charing hybrid cars to act as scattered storage units. This kind of micro-targeted power generation was in fact what Thomas Edison envisioned 100 years ago. Heather Rogers explained in an NYT column two summers ago:

A 1901 article about Edison in The Atlanta Constitution described how his unorthodox ideas about batteries could bring wattage to the countryside: “With a windmill coupled to a small electric generator,” a rural inhabitant “could bottle up enough current to give him light at night.” The earliest wind-powered house was fired up in Cleveland in 1888 by the inventor Charles Brush, but Edison aspired to take the technology to the masses. He made drawings of a windmill to power a cluster of four to six homes, and in 1911 he pitched manufacturers on building a prototype.

Edison’s batteries also fueled some cars and trucks, and he joined forces with Henry Ford to develop an electric automobile that would be as affordable and practical as the Model T. The Constitution article discussed plans to let people recharge their batteries at plug-in sites along trolley lines; the batteries could also be refreshed courtesy of the home windmill.

Edison’s motivations were not environmental; he wanted to sell more batteries and light bulbs. But his engineering approach would have helped make power consumption something more personal, giving consumers the incentive to monitor and economize their demand—one of the aims of the Xcel project.

Image: AP

Globally, wind-powered electricity generation capacity grew 29 percent in 2008 to 121 gigawatts. The American Wind Energy Association announced last month that during 2008, a record-shattering 8,300 megawatts of wind capacity was installed in the United States (HT ClimateProgress). By comparison, China installed new facilities totaling 6,300 megawatts in the last year, but that's the fourth year in a row that it doubled national capacity.

But if we are truly committed to evidence, we should push ourselves to take one last glance backward and review some of the biggest science policy-related lessons that 2008 had to teach. Here, then, is a Science Progress thumbnail of eight advances in science that will have long-lasting impacts on science policy—or advances in science policy that we predict will have long-lasting impacts on science. Counting down from 8 to 1, in no particular order:

8: Strong evidence that making biofuels such as ethanol from food crops is not going to save the world

Detailed global modeling by Timothy Searchinger of Princeton and colleagues showed that production of corn-based ethanol would double the amount of greenhouse gas emissions over a 30-year period instead of reducing those emissions by 20 percent, as previous calculations had suggested. Biofuels from switchgrass grown on U.S. corn lands would increase emissions by fully 50 percent, the study also found. Older research had not properly taken into account the impacts of land-use changes, such as converting carbon-sequestering rainforests to farmland. Thanks to the new understanding, many are now calling for changes in fledgling U.S. economic incentives that had aimed to boost biofuel production on domestic farms.

7: Growing evidence that we are going to have to get CO2 levels down even more than we thought if we don’t want to live in an ice-free world

Record-breaking glacial melts and improvements in climate models have led a growing number of scientists to agree that the world needs to get CO2 levels down to 350 parts per million, and avoid hitting the cap of 450 ppm that many had previously accepted as a goal. While the details are still in dispute, the need to change our behavior with regard to CO2 emissions is now beyond doubt, with real concern that even a very concerted effort at this point will barely be able to save the planet from radical mean temperature changes and greater rises in sea-level than had previously been expected. As NASA climate scientist James Hansen put it earlier this year: “Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.”

6: Overwhelming evidence that in this age of global trade, the Food and Drug Administration is not anywhere near able to protect us from imported contaminants and toxins in our food, toys, drugs and other commodities

Phony heparin in blood thinners from China. Toxic melamine not just in pet food but also in baby formula. Leaded paint on toddler’s toys. Potentially dangerous phthalates such as BPA in baby bottles and intravenous tubing. E. coli in spinach. Salmonella on cantaloupes. The list goes on. It’s not that the agency is inherently inept or its employees unqualified. Quite the contrary, it is bustling with dedicated scientists and public health expertise. But short on resources, struggling with a bureaucratic structure that no longer makes sense, hobbled by a lack of needed legal authorities, the agency is today destined to fail repeatedly. Happily, the string of problems that the FDA battled in 2008 seemed at last to reach the degree of critical mass needed to get the attention of the public and Congress. Expect real action next year, both in terms of budget growth and a push for organizational reform.

5: Passage of legislation requiring “open access” publishing for all research reports resulting from work funded by the National Institutes of Health

After years of heated debate inside and outside of Congress, the NIH implemented the nation’s first open access law in April. As a result, all 80,000 or so research papers published each year that describe the results of NIH-funded studies must now be made available on a free, publicly accessible database within 12 months after publication in a journal. No longer will people who want to read the results of NIH research—paid for with their tax dollars—have to subscribe to expensive scientific journals or pay page charges to the publishers, as has long been the case. The advance will also make it easier for scientists to access each other’s work and for researchers to combine data sets from multiple published reports to perform meta-analyses—a cost-saving means of leveraging scientific data that has been difficult to implement until now.

4: The official opening of the Svalbard seed vault in Norway

This high-security, deep-freeze storage locker, nicknamed by some “the doomsday vault,” is poised to become the seed bank of last resort—the go-to place after a nuclear holocaust or other disaster. After more than a year of construction in the side of a permafrost-bound mountain, it began accepting its first deposits in 2008. The governments responsible for many of the world’s smaller, regional seed banks are not maintaining them, it turns out, or natural disasters or war have damaged or destroyed the banks. The opening of the new vault helped bring food security to the fore, reminding nations that today’s agricultural seeds are the product of ten millennia of slow, scientific work on genetic improvement, and that this legacy deserves both protection and responsible extension.

3: Congressional passage of the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act

It took about a dozen years of lobbying by scientists, ethicists, healthcare advocates, and others, but Congress at last passed GINA, a watershed civil rights bill that prevents employers and health insurers from discriminating on the basis of individuals’ inherited genetic material. The law protects patients and genetic study participants from having their genomes used against them and, by minimizing the threat of genetic mischief, should facilitate the launch of personalized medicine, in which diagnoses and treatments will be tailored to individuals’ genetic codes. It may also boost direct-to-consumer advertising of genetic tests, some of which have proven in the past year to be of questionable medical value. Watch for an escalating debate in 2009 over how best to oversee this nascent-but-growing blend of medicine, marketing, and DNA-based narcissism.

2: The first construction on an entire bacterial genome from scratch

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, reported they had synthesized the complete genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. Previous experiments suggest that if the stitched-together DNA were inserted into a cell, it would automatically “boot up” and turn that cell into what would be the world’s first synthetic life form. Venter’s primary goal is to design, from scratch, artificial cells able to break down pollutants or produce novel biofuels. At the same time, some experts are now wringing their hands over the fact that the same technology could be used to create highly customized biological weapons. This “dual-use” aspect of synthetic biology is sure to be a major focus of scientific societies, regulators, and ethicists in 2009.

1: The appointment of a new team of scientific advisers for the next administration

What can we say? President-elect Barack Obama has created nothing less than a dream team when it comes to putting people with real scientific expertise in all the key slots that will need to make evidence-based decisions over the next four years—including his decision, released over the weekend, to post Nobel-prize-winning cancer researcher Harold Varmus and genomics whiz kid Eric Lander to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.

The actual evidence that all these Obama-appointed scientists are going to hew to, of course, is largely dispiriting. Climate change, energy needs, food insecurity, and economic chaos—all are threatening global peace and undermining the human quest for justice. But progress is not possible without a square look at the facts. I for one am ready to swallow hard, face the unalloyed truth, and support the plans that have the best hope of getting this listing ship of state on an even keel again.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and evidence-based 2009.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Chu’s appointment—along with news that Carol Browner will get the nod to head the new National Energy Council and Lisa Jaskson will be nominated for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency—sends a clear signal about Obama’s commitment to progressive energy and climate policy. But it’s also a clear return to a policymaking approach based on attention to scientific evidence, something readers hardly need to be reminded was far from what the Bush administration has been up to for the past eight years. (The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bruising indictment of Stephen Johnson’s tenure at the EPA. Johnson originally drew accolades as the first scientist to head the agency.) The potential of having a Nobel-winning scientist high in the executive branch is nothing short of energizing for the research community. Here’s some of the reaction in published reports:

“Steve Chu is a world-class intellectual…When I heard that name (for energy secretary), I smiled.”
—Steve Schneider, Stanford University environmental scientist

“When he was first here, he started giving talks about energy and production of energy… He didn’t just present a problem. He told us what we could do. It was an energizing thing to see. He’s not a manager, he’s a leader.”
—Bob Jacobsen, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley physics professor

“He has been relentless about addressing the technical challenges of renewable energy in a deep way.”
—Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley

“[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can’t think of a better guy than Steve.”
—Mike Lubell, physics professor at the City College of New York

“It’s a great sign to see a scientist named as head of this very important department, because it sends a signal that the issues of climate change and energy go well beyond ideology.”
—Keya Chatterjee, World Wildlife Fund

“After the anti-science Bush administration, this is like going to a Mensa meeting after eight years of being trapped in the Flat Earth Society.”
—Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress

Here’s to Dr. Chu and the rest of the next administration’s energy team bringing science back.

SOURCE: oberlin.edu

Oberlin College senior Kristin Braziunas replaced 10,000 incandescent light bulbs with CFLs on her campus and in her community

Looking for a way to decrease your college’s or university’s carbon footprint? Rather than purchasing carbon offsets from businesses with unproven track records, schools can instead look to their own backyards. The students at Oberlin College have cut out the middle man and guaranteed their carbon offset efforts are effective by investing directly in their community.

While some schools purchase carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint, carbon offsets are unregulated by the Federal Trade Commission. This makes it nearly impossible for a school to verify their effectiveness, and some carbon offsets companies invest the money ineffectively. Instead, Oberlin College senior Kristin Braziunas and her fellow “Light Bulb Brigade” at the college handed out 10,000 compact florescent light bulbs, or CFLs, to churches, department stores, and residents in the surrounding community. She exchanged incandescent light bulbs for the CFLs, reaching about 800 residents. CFLs use about 75 percent less electricity than traditional incandescent bulbs, depending on the model. About 48 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, which are responsible for 40 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions, and CFLs can cut carbon emissions by reducing the amount of energy those plants must produce to meet demand. If every American home replaced just one CFL, the emissions reductions would equal to taking 800,000 cars off the road.

Braziunas, in addition to reaching about a quarter of the population of Oberlin, claims she cut about 6,500 tons of carbon from the atmosphere. The institution can measure its carbon reduction based on the how many bulbs are distributed, and unlike other carbon offset credits, Oberlin College can monitor and verify their investment. But the students don’t just hand out bulbs; they also educate their community about the importance of emissions reductions and energy efficiency. Many colleges and universities, from Notre Dame to Princeton, have established CFL exchange programs on their campus, reducing the institution’s overall carbon emissions, but few are expanding this program to the surrounding community. Until the Federal Trade Commission regulates carbon offsets, Oberlin students may be setting a trend for colleges and universities across the nation.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

It wasn’t noticed by everyone, or loudly trumpeted by his campaign. But as the presidential election heated up, now-president-elect Barack Obama also began ramping up his science policy capacity. After answering fourteen questions posed by ScienceDebate2008 in a manner that received applause from the scientific community, Obama went further by releasing, to Wired Science, his list of advisors who had drafted the responses. It was an impressive group whose membership—including former Clinton administration National Institutes of Health director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus; former American Association for the Advancement of Science president Gilbert Ommen; and recent Nobel Laureate Peter Agre—strongly suggests that Obama’s administration will take scientific advice very seriously. In an early October letter to the National Academy of Sciences, Obama further assured the scientific community that he will quickly appoint a presidential science adviser to take with him to Washington.

But let’s look in a little more detail about what American science can expect from president Obama. First, Obama’s answers to ScienceDebate2008 show that he will not allow the “war on science” perpetrated under George W. Bush to continue. Scientists—especially those in the government’s employ—can look forward to an administration that will not be beset by recurrent scandals over political meddling with research. In fact, Obama has specifically pledged to protect scientist whistleblowers and make sure his administration avoids political interference with scientific reports released to the public. These are the right sounds to be making, although thus far, they haven’t been made very loudly. With all of the crises president Obama will inherit, the real question will be whether such matters remain on the radar or receive much priority.

On the two highest-profile science policy issues during the Bush administration, embryonic stem cell research and global warming, president Obama will chart a very different course. The two issues are perhaps most dramatically differentiated by how simple it will be to resolve the one, and how staggeringly difficult it will be to even begin to address the other. On stem cells, Obama can simply reverse President Bush’s August 2001 executive order limiting research to pre-existing cell lines; Congress already wanted this before Democrats controlled both houses, as they do now. In a short time, then, we can assume that the most politicized phase of the embryonic stem cell debate will be over.

Despite many challenges ahead, it’s clearly a new day for science in Washington

On climate change, in contrast, this administration needs a massive and sustained effort to: 1) pass a cap-and-trade bill to cut emissions; 2) invest dramatically in renewable energy research and development; 3) prepare to negotiate an international greenhouse gas treaty, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol; and 4) begin a climate change adaptation and readiness agenda for the nation. On the first two points, Obama has outlined ambitious plans—most notably, to set the U.S. on course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and to invest $150 billion in renewable energy over the next decade. The real question, however, will be whether Obama and progressive members of Congress stick to their guns on a strong cap-and-trade bill despite the dismal economic situation—one in which any legislation will be mercilessly attacked for an alleged capacity to damage the economy and raise energy prices. Stand by.

For the same reason that a greenhouse gas bill will be a tough slog—the terrible economy—securing adequate funding for scientific research, including fulfilling funding obligations for the languishing America COMPETES Act, will also pose major challenges to the Obama administration. Here again, Obama says all the right things—perhaps most notably, he wants to see basic research budgets double over the next decade. But staring down a federal budget deficit that could hit one trillion dollars, Obama will be very hard pressed to start out ambitiously toward this end. Let us hope that the people surrounding him make the strong argument that even though research funding will not provide an immediate solution to the economic problems that George W. Bush has left behind, in the long term it’s the single best way to fire the economy—in the energy sphere above all, but across the board.

Despite many challenges ahead, it’s clearly a new day for science in Washington, and there are strong grounds for feeling optimistic. For scientists who so struggled under George W. Bush, there’s a very real sense that the clouds are parting. Now, we await a still-clearer signal of how president Obama will govern science—his pick of a presidential science adviser, which should come soon, and will tell us a great deal. In the meantime, however, we can note that in his victory speech last night, Obama did not leave out science; rather, he gave it a central role in defining the course the nation has taken over the past half century: “A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.”

Let the tradition finally resume.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency most focused on heat island mitigation, walks a tightrope between promoting environmental practices and not offending certain industries or social groups. One way to reduce heat islands, after all, would be to pave, build, and drive less. For instance, when Purdue University studied its home Tippecanoe County, it found almost three parking spaces—not counting the multiple floors of parking garages or lots on private property—for every one resident.[2] (Sprawl smears rather than vitiates heat islands.) But EPA focuses less controversially on the materials with which we urbanize, not how or why, though this approach still helps cool urban areas and reduce energy consumption.

Heat islands increase ground-level ozone (smog) by evaporating more volatile organic compounds from gas tanks and accelerating chemical reactions that contribute to ozone. Many cities, especially in the eastern United States and in southern California, violate National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone. Their heat islands aggravate the problem. Heat islands also increase air conditioning use, which means cars or power plants burn more fossil fuels. This, in turn, raises building energy costs by consuming more energy at the most expensive peak times, exacerbates climate change, and releases more pollutants like mercury or nitrogen oxide, a precursor to both smog and acid rain. The cumulative acute consequences can kill thousands of people, as did heat waves in the Midwest in 1995 or Europe in 2003. As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are currently increasing at the fastest rates yet,^[3] heat islands presage what life may be like in the future outside urban areas. Nonetheless, few cities have taken concerted action to address heat islands. Ameliorating heat islands now, though, could save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help locally offset global temperature increases.

Heat Islands 101

Heat islands draw energy from two main sources: the sun and human activity. Compared to trees, grass, and dirt, surfaces like asphalt roads and tarpaper shingles absorb and retain more solar radiation and trap much less water, which could evaporate and cool the surfaces. The net effect means the urban infrastructure gets hotter—sometimes 30 to 50°C hotter for components like black roofs[4]—and stays hotter than vegetated areas. This surface heat bleeds into the air, even long after sunset, to form the heat island.

At the same time that they soak up heat, cities produce it. All those residents maintain a healthy internal temperature of 37°C (roughly 98.6°F). Computers, blenders, and light bulbs emit heat, as do the automobiles, air conditioners, and bakeries. This anthropogenic heat often contributes less to the heat island than solar radiation, but it can be significant, as David Sailor at Portland State University has argued. “While it is true that anthropogenic heating is small compared with summertime mid-day solar insolation,” he wrote, “it plays a major role in the surface energy balance at times when the urban heat island effect is at its maximum (night time and winter).”[5] The resultant heat island is further modulated by airflow through the city, nearby bodies of water, and other regional characteristics. For example, irrigated lawns in a desert city like Phoenix may actually keep some neighborhoods cooler during the day.

The Environmental Protection Agency, within its current constraints, tries to encourage heat island mitigation. Of the agency’s five broad goals, “Clean Air and Global Climate Change” in recent years received about 13 percent of the agency’s $7 billion budget, 3 percent more than the last-place priority, “Compliance and Environmental Stewardship.”[6] Some of that 13 percent trickles down to the Climate Protection Partnerships, mostly voluntary ways for industry and consumers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that trickle goes to Energy Star, the joint Department of Energy-EPA program to promote energy efficient appliances and, more recently, buildings. State and Local Programs, meanwhile, houses the Partnerships’ work on heat islands, which has produced public meetings, a website, and on-line calculator after an initial study of five urban heat islands from 1998-2002; a guidebook in progress was originally slated for publication in 2007.[7] (In full disclosure, I was involved in the outreach involved for about a year as an EPA contractor.)

Many of studies have shown heat waves increase mortality from the following factors and perhaps other causes:

Cool Construction

As mentioned previously, EPA policy revolves around building construction methods, and zeroes in on three generally accepted options: increased vegetation, cool roofs, and green roofs, with cool pavements emerging as a fourth choice. Other efforts, such as New York or Houston’s heat island initiatives or Arizona State’s National Center of Excellence,[9] likewise focus on these technologies.

These technical approaches operate similarly and often have benefits beyond heat islands. The first option, planting more trees and other vegetation in cities, reduces heat islands because vegetation reflects more light back to space than common construction materials, shades surfaces and buildings, and stores water that then evaporates and takes heat with it. But that’s not all. By shading roads, for example, trees reduce the pavement’s temperature fluctuations, prolonging its service life. Trees also raise property values, sequester carbon dioxide, and filter pollutants from the air and water. These benefits almost always outweigh the cost of planting and maintaining urban forests.[10]

flickr.com/416style

Place vegetation on a roof instead of alongside sidewalks, and you create a green roof. Modern green roofs began catching on in Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s. This one in is in Toronto.

Place vegetation on a roof instead of alongside sidewalks, and you create a green roof. Modern green roofs began catching on in Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s. They are spreading in the United States because they boost insulation and enable evaporative cooling, the process that wicks heat away with water into the air, which keeps the roof cooler and reduces the heat island. The living insulation reduces energy costs associated with buildings and also protects the roof membrane underneath the plants and soil from exposure to the elements, thus extending the roof’s life. In addition, like vegetation elsewhere, vegetated roofs can expand habitats for wildlife and beekeepers, filter pollutants, and also reduce runoff by keeping rainwater on the roof or slowing its rate of discharge. Portland, Oregon, already has 9 acres of green roofs and hopes to quintuple that number soon, primarily to keep pollution out of local waterways and the ocean. Chicago, meanwhile, has focused on green roofs to save energy and keep the city cooler, since a grassy expanse absorbs less heat than sheets of rubber.

A cheaper, albeit less beneficial, alternative to green roofs is the cool roof. Cool roofs utilize the principle that white surfaces reflect more light than dark ones and thus stay cooler. Consequently, white plastic sheets or sprays coat many roofs, including California’s state capitol. Certain clay tiles can also reduce temperatures. Cool roof products have Energy Star certification and are more popular in southern states like Florida, Arizona, and Texas. But even Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia benefit from them because they can lower heat-wave mortality and typically save more money from decreased air conditioning than they cost in increased heating.[11] One study estimated that 5 to 10 percent of a city’s electricity demand compensates for the increased temperatures from the heat island alone.[12] That is one reason California began to require cool roofs for certain types of construction after the soaring electricity prices and rolling blackouts of 2000 and 2001.

Cool pavements, finally, take advantage of reflectivity, evaporative cooling, or both. Some pavements, like concrete with lighter additives, have a higher albedo (reflect more light.) Others, like porous asphalt, allow water to drain through them into the ground, which replenishes groundwater and also cools the pavement when that water evaporates from the soil. But given all the pavement and roofs in the world, and with a planetary population that is increasingly urban, widespread changes in net albedo could make a huge difference. Hashem Akbari, a prolific heat island researcher, and his collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that increasing the reflectance of roofs 40 percent and of pavements 15 percent would reduce energy consumption enough to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 44 metric gigatons, much more than a year’s worth of global greenhouse gas emissions.[13] Simulations elsewhere have suggested widespread green roofs and cool roofs could also lower average city temperatures, which may become increasingly worthwhile as overall global temperatures rise.[14]

Add It Up

In the general absence of defined heat island policies, the drive toward more environmental construction currently enables heat island mitigation, but often as a byproduct. Residential and commercial buildings each account for about 17 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions when you include the electricity they consume.[15] Making them more energy-efficient saves their owners money and typically cuts their contribution to the local heat island. The large-scale effects of such efforts, supported by programs like LEED and GreenGlobes and increasingly written into city and state codes, will be known only later. Meanwhile, the benefits of other projects, like replacing roadways with cooler pavements, contribute less directly to the contractor or owner and are instead diffused across the entire public.

Heat islands reveal what life may be like in a world a few degrees hotter. They also reveal the tragedy of the commons that plagues efforts to slow or adapt to global climate change: some individuals benefit greatly from business as usual while everyone loses in the end. However, even the constrained, initial attempts to address heat islands show both individuals and societies can win, but that much more collective will and political coordination is needed for the winnings to increase and spread.

Mark Meier is a freelance writer with a particular interest in ethics, identity, and social structure.

Notes

^[1] Greater London Authority, “London’s Urban Heat Island: A Summary Guide for Decision Makers” (London: Greater London Authority, 2006), available at www.london.gov.uk/mayor/environment/climate-change/docs/UHI_summary_report.pdf. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, “Mitigating New York City’s Heat Island with Urban Forestry, Living Roofs, and Light Surfaces” (2006), available at http://www.nyserda.org/programs/environment/emep/project/6681_25/6681_25_pwp.asp.

^[2] Douglas M. Main, “Parking spaces outnumber drivers 3-to-1, drive pollution and warming,” Purdue University News (2007), available at http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007b/070911PijanowskiParking.html.

[3] Global Carbon Projectm “Carbon Budget 2007,” available at http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbontrends/index.htm.

^[4] S. Konopacki, L. Gartland, H. Akbari, and I. Rainer. 1998. “Demonstration of Energy Savings of Cool Roofs.” Paper LBNL-40673. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA. S. Konopacki, and H. Akbari. 2001. “Measured Energy Savings and Demand Reduction from a Reflective Roof Membrane on a Large Retail Store in Austin.” Paper LBNL-47149. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA.

^[5] David J. Sailor and Hongli Fan, “The Important of Including Anthropogenic Heating in Mesoscale Modeling of the Urban Heat Island,” (American Meteorological Society conference, 2004), available at http://ams.confex.com/ams/84Annual/techprogram/paper_74444.htm.

^[6] FY2009 EPA Budget in Brief, available at http://www.epa.gov/budget/2009/2009bib.pdf.

^[7] http://www.epa.gov/heatislands.

[8] The information in this table is drawn from EPA’s “Excessive Heat Event Guidebook” available at http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/about/pdf/EHEguide_final.pdf and Health Effects of Ozone in Patients with Asthma at http://www.epa.gov/03healthtraining/effects.html.

^[9] http://ccsr.columbia.edu/cig/uhi/index.html, http://www.harc.edu/Projects/CoolHouston/About/, and http://asusmart.com/.

^[10] See for two examples: Portland Parks and Recreation. 2007. “Portland’s Urban Forest Canopy: Assessment and Public Tree Evaluation” available at http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/ image.cfm?id=171829. And also E.G., McPherson, J.R. Simpson, P.J. Peper, S.E. Maco, and Q. Xiao. 2005. “Municipal Forest Benefits and Costs in Five US Cities.” Journal of Forestry 103(8):411-416.

^[11] S. Konopacki, H. Akbari, M. Pomerantz, S. Gabersek, and L. Gartland. 1997. “Cooling Energy Savings Potential of Light-Colored Roofs for Residential and Commercial Buildings in 11 U.S. Metropolitan Areas.” Paper LBNL-39433. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA.

^[12] H. Akbari, “Energy Savings Potentials and Air Quality Benefits of Urban Heat Island Mitigation” (2005), available at http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/860475-UlHWIq/860475.PD.

^[13] Akbari, H., S. Menon, and A. Rosenfeld, “Global Cooling: Increasing Solar Reflectance of Urban Areas to Offset CO2,” (2008). In press, Climatic Change. Reported in Research Highlights. “White Roofs Cool the World, Offset CO2, and Delay Global Warming.” http://www.energy.ca.gov/2008publications/LBNL-1000-2008-022/LBNL-1000-2008-022.PDF.

^[14] 1) K. Liu. and B. Bass. 2005. “Performance of Green Roof Systems.” National Research Council Canada, Report No. NRCC-47705, Toronto, Canada. 2) C. Rosenzweig, W. Solecki et al. 2006.” Mitigating New York City’s Heat Island with Urban Forestry, Living Roofs, and Light Surfaces.” Sixth Symposium on the Urban Environment and Forum on Managing our Physical

^[15] The 1990-2006 Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks is available from http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventoryreport.html.

Consider Texas. Long the leading oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California two years ago. Texas now has nearly 6,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity online and a staggering 39,000 megawatts in the construction and planning stages. When all this is completed, Texas will have 45,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 45 coal-fired power plants). This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 24 million people, enabling Texas to feed electricity to nearby states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

The analysis is chock-full of such data, which they helpfully also provide in table and chart form. To get a real sense of the intense growth in these sectors, words alone don’t really do the job:

These numbers underscore the point that we currently have the technologies to power the country on renewable energy and create jobs at the same time. The federal government can help with the development, scaling, and deployment by investing more in energy R&D.

SOURCE: NREL

Prairie grass.

Writing at the Switchboard blog, Nathanael Greene is pleased with the conclusions of 23 scientists who co-authored the Policy Forum in Friday’s issue of Science, “Sustainable Biofuels Redux” (subscription). He quotes the clear line the authors take on feedstocks that compete with food supplies: “… [W]e know that grain-based biofuel cropping systems as currently managed cause environmental harm,” as well as their appreciation that current systems can get better: “[B]ecause grain-based ethanol will likely remain in the nation’s energy portfolio, it is important to understand that appropriate practices can soften its environmental impact.”

Greene quotes at length from the article’s conclusion and nods in agreement that strong policy action is necessary:

We cannot repeat enough the point that cellulosic biofuels can be good but only will be if we decide through our policies to require them to be good. Furthermore, we know enough to act now to position the industry in the right direction.

I think the GHG standards and sourcing safeguards in the RFS are major step in this direction, but I heartily agree with the authors that policies to promote broadly sustainable biofuels are not in place.

Last year’s energy bill updated the parameters of the Renewable Fuels Standard to stipulate that various categories of biofuels must meet certain greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and for most of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency has been at work the complex rule-making process for the legislation. We have more on the legislation and that process here and here.

But just today, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that tomorrow they will release a new plan for accelerating the development of the sustainable biofuels industry. The media advisory is short and does not address the RFS rulemaking, which of course is the purview of EPA, though the status of that process seems relevant.

The text of the release:

On Tuesday, October 7, 2008, Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Ed Schafer and Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Samuel W. Bodman will release the National Biofuels Action Plan, an interagency plan detailing the collaborative efforts to accelerate the development of a sustainable biofuels industry. The Cabinet Secretaries will announce additional news related to the biofuels industry, new biofuel technology and ethanol blending.

John Marburger has an impressive title: science adviser to the president and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But his predecessors had a slightly different title: assistant to the president, the highest rank of staffers within the Executive Office of the President. Much has been made of President Bush’s decision to appoint a science adviser to a diminished post, but the move resonated with the administration’s repeated maneuvers to downplay, disregard, or launch all-out assaults on science over the course of the past eight years.

But on the eve of a new administration, it’s time to look forward and think about the scientists who will advise the next president. The National Academies have just weighed in with their take on the issue, offering a report detailing the most critical presidential science appointments in the executive branch and ways to streamline the process of getting new hires into their posts. Their first recommendation, however, is to hire the top science adviser at the level of assistant to the president:

White House leadership in science and technology requires three steps. Immediately after the election, the president-elect should identify his candidate for the position of Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST). This individual will provide advice, identify and recruit other science and technology presidential appointees. After inauguration, the President should promptly both appoint this person as APST and nominate him or her as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The director position should be cabinet-level, with an office in the Old Executive Office Building.

Many of the most pressing matters of the new administration will require forthright scientific advice, and only through an assistant to the president who can participate in cabinet-level discussions and coordinate with other senior staffers in economic, domestic, national security, and energy policy will the next commander in chief get the advice that he needs. NAS is not the first group to argue that the science adviser post must be elevated back to the assistant level.

Moreover, NAS recommends that the president not dawdle on the matter of the thousands of other appointments across the administration. That means getting to work well in advance. Like today.

Who do readers think the next president should appoint as the top science adviser?

Tuesday

Climate Change Legislation and Revenue Recycling
Environmental and Energy Study Institute
B369 Rayburn House Office Building
8 a.m.

Electric Vehicle Development/Outlook
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
366 Dirksen Senate Office Building
10 a.m.

Domestic HIV Prevention
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
2154 Rayburn House Office Building
10 a.m.

EPA Children’s Health Protection
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
406 Dirksen Senate Office Building
10 a.m.

Why Broadband Matters
Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
253 Russell Senate Office Building
10:30 a.m.

Cybersecurity Recommendations for the Next Administration
House Homeland Security Committee; Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology Subcommittee
311 Cannon House Office Building
2 p.m.

CISTP Seminar Series on Science, Technology, and Innovation
The George Washington University, Center for International Science and Technology Policy
The Commons, 1957 E Street, NW, Suite 403, Washington, DC 20052
5 p.m.

Wednesday

Exporting Electronic Waste
House Foreign Affairs Committee
2172 Rayburn House Office Building
2 p.m.

Thursday

Antibiotics: Is a strong offense the best defense?
Koshland Science Museum
500 5th St NW, Washington, DC
6:30 p.m.

Preventing Climate Change
House Ways and Means Committee
1100 Longworth House Office Building
10:30 a.m.

EPA Scientific Integrity
House Energy and Commerce Committee
2322 Rayburn House Office Building
10 a.m.

Social Sciences’ Public Health Role
House Science and Technology Committee
2318 Rayburn House Office Building
10 a.m.

Emerging U.S. Water Contaminants
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
2167 Rayburn House Office Building
2 p.m.

Panel Discussion on Role of Science in Presidential Policy
Featuring Science Progress Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Moreno and Contributing Editor Chris Mooney
University of Mississippi
Live Web cast
4 p.m.

flickr.com/omnineon

One of the many things that U.S. government must do to move the economy towards a low-carbon future is to support research and development in energy technologies. Wednesday morning, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will hear from an expert panel on what needs to be done, as they talk about “Investing in the Future: R&D needs to meet America’s Energy and Climate Challenges.”

Often, discussion of energy R&D focuses too narrowly on the possibility of transcendent scientific breakthroughs, like a cheap and practical hydrogen car, which have failed to materialize after decades of work—and would anyway take too long to commercialize to have a significant impact on emissions in the near future. As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joe Romm has argued in a variety of venues, including in a recent debate on the Economist.com, we have the technologies now that can preserve the planet and rejuvenate the world economy—we just need to focus on developing, scaling, and deploying them. Writes Romm: “If we want to preserve the health and well-being of future generations, then focusing government policy and resources on speeding up existing technology deployment is far more important than focusing them on breakthrough technology development.” Earlier this year, Romm argued in Nature for rapid deployment of the “stabilization wedges“ first proposed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala.

Science Progress adviser Tom Kalil has argued on multiple occasions for doubling federal funding for key research agencies, including the Department of Energy Office of Science. In his innovation report for CAP, he offers a fistful of energy technology advances that merit federal support more then the myopic hydrogen car:

• Nanotechnology-based solar cells as cheap as paint
• The use of synthetic biology to create organisms that can convert sunlight directly to next-generation fuels
• Improvement in battery technology for plug-in hybrids
• Cost-effective energy storage that allows for increased use of intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar
• Advances in carbon capture-and-storage technologies for responsible use of coal
• Predictive modeling of combustion devices to design more efficient engines, using supercomputers capable of quadrillions of calculations per second
• Solid-state lighting that is 50 percent more efficient than today’s compact fluorescents
• An “intelligent grid” that is self-healing, offers special rates for purchases of energy-efficient appliances, provides real-time pricing to reduce peak load, and can handle increased use of distributed energy resources
• Smart windows that can go from clear to translucent in an instant, saving billions of dollars in lighting, cooling, and heating costs
• Zero-energy buildings that produce all of their energy from renewable sources.

CAP also has a plan for how to focus and organize national efforts in energy R&D. John Podesta, Peter Ogden, and John Deutch argued in “A New Strategy to Spur Energy Innovation” that in addition to doubling, at a minimum, current energy R&D program funding, the government needs strong leadership in order to prioritize:

• Creating an interagency Energy Innovation Council to develop a multiyear National Energy RD&D strategy for the United States
• Launching a sustained and integrated energy R&D program in key areas
• Establishing an Energy Technology Corporation to manage demonstration projects
• Creating an energy technology career path within the civil service.

Energy R&D will help us save the planet and create millions of green jobs, but it can also catalyze public enthusiasm for science. As Chris Mooney lamented in a recent column, “Yes, everybody is talking about energy these days. But they’re not necessarily talking about it as a scientific opportunity so much as a business one. The poster child for energy innovation today is T. Boone Pickens, rather than a scientist or engineer. And that says it all.”

Bioethics meets voting technology: Summer Johnson grabs a story on blog.bioethics.net on how mobile voting machines could empower those who cannot commute to a polling station.

Nat Torkington has thoughts on better tools for teaching evolution in high school science classes at O’Reilly Radar.

Sheril Kirshenbaum at Next Generation Energy dreams of New York…with wind turbines.

Center for American Progress Fellow Bob Sussman has a three part series on the Clean Air Interstate Rule and how to rebuild clean air policy.

Over at social-networking megasite Mashable, Paul Glazowski discovers scivee.tv, a new site that integrates scientific posters and papers with video commentary from researchers.

Liz Borkowski picks up news that California is taking product safety rules into its own hands with a Green Chemistry Initiative, over at The Pump Handle.

AP

Don’t forget the trucking: One of the major blind spots in calculating a company’s total greenhouse gas emissions is not counting supply chain inputs.

Corporations typically underestimate their carbon footprints by an average of 75 percent, according to a new study from Carnegie Mellon researchers. One of the major blind spots is in calculating the total greenhouse gas emissions from myriad supply chain inputs, as opposed to the direct emissions involved in primary operations. The study authors told Christa Marshall at ClimateWire (subscription) that “most companies focus solely on direct emissions from their operations, such as those spewing from headquarters and accompanying facilities, and from purchased energy.”

As a result, study author H. Scott Matthews suggested that “most companies were calculating ‘toe prints’ rather than carbon footprints.”

The study indicates that another problem is that the term “carbon footprint” itself does not have a fixed meaning:

The definition of “carbon footprint” is surprisingly vague given the growth in the term’s use over the past decade. The term itself is rooted in the literature of “ecological footprinting” (3): attempting to describe the total area of land needed to produce some level of human consumption. Because the land use to make most consumer products is fairly distant in time and space from the final consumer, the ecological footprint is inherently a full life-cycle calculation. However, this does not seem to be true for the term’s new successor, the carbon footprint; Wiedmann and Minx (4) found a large variety of definitions that differ in which gases are accounted for, where boundaries of analysis are drawn, and several other criteria.

The researchers have developed an “Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment” that utilizes publicly available data on various economic sectors. But they are careful to note that any lifecycle GHG calculation will be imperfect, regardless of model or input data. Moreover, the accuracy of a company’s calculations hinges on the firm’s own accountability:

We argue that the footprints should be useful in pursuing more effective climate change policies. However, the information contained in a carbon footprint varies depending on how it was calculated and how much responsibility the entity being “footprinted” is willing to take on. There is an inherent trade-off between comprehensiveness (i.e., the percentage of total world GHG emissions included in a system) and participation (i.e., the percentage of businesses or consumers taking part in the system). Because consumers can influence the carbon footprints of goods and services through their purchase decisions, a broad estimation of carbon footprints including supply chain effects is appropriate. Similarly, as a corporation can influence its suppliers, a broader estimation can similarly motivate more effective corporate climate change policies

Modeling lifecycle carbon emissions is not a trivial matter. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently working with a variety of complex models as they move forward with the rulemaking process for the Renewable Fuels Standard. GreenWire reports that the four major consulting firms are all moving to help corporations with their emissions calculations. Having accurate, well-understood models will be critical for many industries when Congress and the next administration move ahead with comprehensive climate change legislation.

But the forecasters were not only wrong but stupendously, inexplicably wrong. The official US forecast of future oil prices, released by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration in June of this year predicted oil prices for 2008 that are off by a factor of two. In fact, the June EIA forecast estimates that even in the highest price scenario, oil prices wouldn’t reach $100 a barrel by 2030. The EIA’s “reference case,” their best guess, shows oil at $60 a barrel in 2030. Energy plans around these estimates are bound to be just as reliable.

Estimating future oil prices is a thankless business since so many unpredictable events can shape them. Better intelligence would have helped, but we know from past experience that it is tough to predict a war in Sinai (1973), or the fall of the Shah of Iran (1978), events that sent oil prices soaring. Yet this time, the sharp increase in oil prices in 2008 did not result from any such shock. Prices were largely driven by the sheer pressure of growing international demand, including the exploding economies of China, India, and Brazil. Instead of a careful review of these enormous market forces, EIA analysis was obsessed by reviewing the impact of drilling in Alaska—issues that have almost no impact on the price of oil in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter.

As intelligence failures go, failure to anticipate the doubling of the price of a commodity central to the U.S. economy is a doozy. Blindsided by the sudden price increase we have no practical options to prevent the painful adjustments that have been forced on households and businesses around the country.

The lack of practical options, of course, doesn’t protect us from terrible ideas sold in the name of instant cures—such as offshore drilling or cutting federal gasoline taxes. Our ignorance also has long term effects by making it difficult to construct the kinds of energy policies we need.

Last year, for example, there was a wrenching debate over increasing fuel economy standards with lots of warring analysis—much of it based on EIA-derived oil price predictions that turned out to be absurdly low. If the Congress in 2007 knew that prices would reach $4 a gallon in 2008, it is likely that the standards chosen would have been much higher.

In fairness, the Department of Energy was not alone in missing the obvious. In a classic case of herd thinking, private energy forecasters were also badly wrong about oil. Global Insights Inc. estimated that crude oil prices would be $46 per in 2030. While closer to the mark, even the usually reliable Deutsche Bank was caught off guard, estimating $80 per barrel by 2030

So what should be done? First, we should take a careful look at why the forecasting was so colossally wrong. Second, we should find a way to build new teams to undertake forecasting—teams that combine specialized energy expertise with analysts able to recognize that the basic terms of international supply and demand have been upended by massive economic growth in China and elsewhere.

The rules will keep changing. Major decisions about how to manage climate change will drive fundamental changes in how energy is produced and used. We badly need analytical teams able to keep pace with these developments, evaluate alternatives, and provide us early warning of problems and opportunities. This will require combining the talents of several agencies, including the State Department and the intelligence community.

And perhaps most importantly, we need to give the Energy Information Agency the resources it needs to do its critical job. The agency’s statistical departments and analytical departments have both been cut back and starved for years. It’s tough to complain about a group that is expected to do so much with so little. The price we’re paying for saving nickels and dimes in analysis is very high. We’ll never get energy intelligence completely right, but we can’t again afford to be so wrong about something so important.

Henry Kelly is the President of the Federation of American Scientists, cofounder and Chair of the Board for Scientists and Engineers for America.

But enough hinting already. If I may be so bold as to interpret the Zeitgeist, it’s saying this: American science stands on the verge of acquiring a new, transformational mission, one similar in its magnitude—although very different in its substance—to the one that it took up in the post World War II and post-Sputnik era.

Back then, science’s mission was to provide the technological insights that would improve not only our quality of life but the national defense and, above all, keep us ahead of the Soviets. The mission was sparked by the 1957 launch of Sputnik, and epitomized by the Apollo program: A dramatic, government-funded buildup in scientific capacity with an overwhelming, inspirational goal—put a man on the moon and do it first. Which we did.

The poster child for energy innovation today is T. Boone Pickens, rather than a scientist or engineer. And that says it all.

Now, in contrast, the new mission is this: Pursue the innovations that will allow us to fundamentally remake our energy economy and infrastructure, so that we can power our society through far cheaper, renewable sources—while creating thousands of new jobs and defeating global warming to boot. Skyrocketing energy costs and worsening climate change are the sparks behind this mission. And it will be epitomized by…well, we don’t quite know yet. But something BIG.

Now I fully admit that so far, much of this might sound somewhat familiar and less than earth-shattering. But if that’s the case, pause for a second. Yes, everybody is talking about energy these days. But they’re not necessarily talking about it as a scientific opportunity so much as a business one. The poster child for energy innovation today is T. Boone Pickens, rather than a scientist or engineer. And that says it all.

Now’s the time, it seems to me, for scientists to step up and claim the frame that is already so prevalent that top politicians are speaking about it. When Al Gore talks about our “generational moment,” after all, who better than scientists to seize it?

In fact, it’s greatly in scientists’ interests to be leading the charge on energy right now. Here is a scientific topic that everybody—everybody across the entire culture—cares about. Here is a chance for educating the public, infusing science literacy, drawing increased funding, and even for showing some old fashioned heroism.

The door is more than halfway open, after all, and just waiting to be pushed. Politicians are already sounding many of these notes—it’s just that they’re not always doing so in the context of bestowing a new responsibility and mission upon America’s scientific establishment.

Hillary Clinton came the closest. Speaking on the fifty-year anniversary of Sputnik, the Senator called for an “Apollo-like effort in clean, renewable energy,” and a $50 billion “Strategic Energy Fund” to generate and subsidize innovation. Senator John McCain, meanwhile, has proposed that the federal government offer a $300 million dollar prize for development of advance electric car batteries. Finally, Senator Barack Obama, like Clinton, talks about investing vast sums in clean energy—creating a “green energy sector”—but has done less to frame the matter as a challenge for America’s talented population of scientists in particular. (The point may be implicit in some of Obama’s rhetoric, but it isn’t really stated.)

So the politicians are starting to get it—but don’t fully grasp the science angle yet. And what of the scientists?

Perhaps the most science-centric articulations of the idea that I’ve seen come from Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, writing right here at Science Progress, and Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute. The latter argued recently in the San Francisco Chronicle that we need a National Energy Education Act, parallel to the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act of 1958, that would invest dramatic sums in creating educational opportunities for scientists who wish to work on new energy innovations. “New research grants, graduate fellowships and energy-science-and-policy focused curricula; financial aid and loan forgiveness for students entering clean energy development fields”—all this, and more, are part of Norris’s and Jenkins’s proposal. And in focusing their prescriptions on universities in particular, they’re getting quite close to the kind of vision for American science that we need to see emerge right now, just as it did in the troubled days after Sputnik.

Certainly the magnitude of the challenge is similar. And there’s an even more important parallel—the mechanism by which the challenge must be answered.

Following Sputnik, the buildup in national scientific capacity came about as the direct and intentional result of dramatic government investment. Federal funding for scientific education and scientific research alike boomed, because suddenly science became a matter of major public import. The private sector, alone, wasn’t going to undertake anything visionary like the Apollo program; and by the same token, although private sector energy companies and entrepreneurs will surely make a fortune off of the new innovations that we so badly need right now, they can’t be expected to comprehensively underwrite the undirected, curiosity-driven research that will lay the groundwork for them.

All of which amounts to an inspiring vision, to be sure—but at the same time, I’m concerned. Is there enough fire in the belly right now—and enough outspoken leadership—in the scientific community?

American scientists certainly don’t seem to be having any problem producing new research or training students today. The NSF reports that a record number of science and engineering Ph.D.s, 29,854, were awarded in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are currently available. But whether these students are taking up their doctorates with a sense of clear mission, other than steadily increasing our knowledge, is less obvious.

In fact, one could argue that the whole history of American science in the post-World War II era can be divided into a period in which the research community marched along with a clear national mission and a central animating cause—and then a period in which that sense of unity gradually fell away amid the decline of cultural consensus associated with the Vietnam era and afterwards. Science budgets soon grew less generous; science itself increasingly came under fire. Politicians began to treat scientists like just another interest group; and sure enough, every interest group hired one or two of its own.

This broad trend of declining influence for science could certainly be reversed in the context of a dramatic buildup of university-centered energy research; a buildup that would come about at the hands of a visionary president, and in response to an urgent national need.

The mission is there, just waiting, should American science choose to accept it.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Spanish company Abengoa Solar has said they will pull the plug on a 280-megawatt solar-thermal plant currently planned in Arizona if the Senate does not pass the full eight-year extension, as the company expects it will take six years for them to get online (and thus, for the tax credits to apply). Sempra Generation has stated that a plan to develop 500 megawatts of solar power is contingent on the extension of the tax credits. To put that in perspective, approximately 150 megawatts of grid-connected photovoltaic capacity was installed in the United States in 2007. The expiration of the tax credits would also dampen the growth and innovation of the wind industry, which grew by 45 percent last year and, thanks in part to T. Boone Pickens, is expected to grow even more in the next few years.

Congress may be reluctant to pass legislation that will cost taxpayers more money. According to Time, an extension of the credit will cost taxpayers about $1 billion (equivalent, as the article points out, to about half a week of the Iraq war). But the cost to taxpayers is paltry compared to the cost of not encouraging the renewable industry. One consulting company reports that the expiration of the tax credit could result in the loss of 116,000 jobs and $19 billion of investments.

But as I’ve watched Hurricane Dolly form in the Gulf of Mexico and careen towards the Texas-Mexico border—rapidly intensifying into a Category 2 storm just before landfall–I can only think one thing. If we’re worried about gas prices now, what will we do if (God forbid) at some point over the next several months, one or more Gulf hurricanes knock out oil production infrastructure and refining capacity?

Such a hypothetical disaster has already been discussed this year, based upon our alarming experience from the mega hurricane year of 2005. The Gulf of Mexico provides 30 percent of U.S. oil production and 45 percent of its refining capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. No wonder that after Hurricane Katrina shut down virtually all Gulf production in 2005, we saw average gas prices jump above $3 a gallon for the first time, climbing from $2.65 to $3.11 in the space of a week. (At the time, such a price was considered shocking.)

It’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And then a month later came Hurricane Rita, another Category 5 aimed at oil rich Gulf waters and coasts. Taken together the two storms damaged 457 oil pipelines, destroyed 113 platforms, and most important, temporarily shut down oil production entirely. As the U.S. Minerals Management Service puts it, Katrina and Rita represented “the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf of Mexico.” Overall roughly three-quarters of total Gulf oil platforms were in the path of one or both storms, as were two-thirds of the region’s miles of pipeline.

To be sure, after the storms passed gas prices once again declined steadily, as production capacity in the Gulf gradually came back online and President Bush released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The American Petroleum Institute assures us its companies worked as hard as possible to recover quickly.

The vulnerability of our economy to oil price spikes at that time, however, was nothing compared to what it is now. Today we would kill for $3 a gallon at the pump, and the entire stock market swoons over any increase in oil prices. Some forecasts suggest price spikes in the event of another well-targeted Gulf hurricane could be as high as $5 to $6 per gallon. We’re much more panicky now: Could we really withstand a price blip like the one that occurred after Katrina?

That’s something to consider, because every indicator right now is that this hurricane season is something to worry about. We’re not in the August-October peak of the season yet, but we’ve already seen four named storms this year and two strong hurricanes—far ahead of the typical schedule. In particular, although the recently dissipated Hurricane Bertha didn’t ultimately cause much impact upon any land areas, it showed record longevity and near-record intensity for a storm occurring so early in the year. Bertha could represent a harbinger of a still-more active season once Atlantic sea surface temperatures reach their peak. The calling card of the deadly 2005 hurricane season, after all, was a hyperactive month of July.

Meanwhile, Dolly has already required a few platforms to be evacuated, although most recently oil prices have declined, based in part upon the anticipation that the storm’s track will not pose a severe danger to production. But another storm this year certainly might.

Granted, we shouldn’t get too alarmist: Neither 2006 nor 2007 saw anything like the hurricane destruction that befell the U.S. in 2005. Hopefully we’ll be spared this year too—but we won’t be forever. And so I believe it’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And for that matter, why only focus on the danger to our economy posed by Gulf of Mexico hurricanes? Last year, a rare Arabian Sea cyclone, Gonu, very nearly made its way into the Persian Gulf—if it had, a true oil economy disaster could have been in the offing. And in fact, some climate models now suggest that global warming ought to increase the occurrence of hurricanes in the Arabian Sea.

For indeed, oil production and hurricanes may ultimately be linked via climate change—the burning of oil warms the climate, which provides more ocean heat for hurricanes, which can then (as we’ve seen) temporarily wipe out production of the oil. We’re still waiting for a definitive understanding of the precise hurricane-climate relationship, but it remains a reasonable assumption that the storms will get worse on average.

None of which is to say that we ought to burn less oil to prevent global warming so as to (in turn) prevent hurricanes. That’s strained logic indeed, given the amount of warming we’re already committed to and the fact that hurricanes will always be with us, irrespective of what the climate is doing.

However, it is perhaps to say that burning less oil in the future—and instead turning to alternative power sources—would reduce the impact of inevitable hurricane catastrophes on our wallets. And these days, that kind of reasoning sounds more and more compelling.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Michael Jacobson, Executive Director of CSPI, opened the event by emphasizing that politicians must “allow facts to drive policymaking, not the other way around.” Merrill Goozner, the director of CSPI’s the Integrity in Science project, remained optimistic, stating that the group wanted to look forward rather than backwards. He called for the federal government to take an increased role “if our nation is going to curb many of the [scientific] challenges that lie ahead.”

The conference covered a variety of topics, including curbing industry influence on regulatory science, conservation, and conflicts of interest, but one major topic of conversation was renewable energy. Gal Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security spoke of the need for Congress to mandate that every new car sold in America be “flexible”—able to run on multiple sources of energy rather than only on gasoline. Ken Zweibel of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory then argued that solar and wind energy “are a lot closer to economic reality than people realize.”

Integrity in the science that informs renewable energy policy making is a critical issue, as recent years have seen many officials and the Bush administration downplay the reality of global climate change and delay serious efforts to invest in renewable energy. For example, the Illinois FutureGen project, which was supposed to create the world’s first near-zero emissions coal plant, had its funding removed one day after Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address in which he argued that the country should “fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

But the most recent disregard of scientific evidence in crafting energy policy is in the national discussion over offshore oil drilling. Just yesterday, President Bush lifted executive orders that ban on off-shore oil drilling. A legislative moratorium still bars companies from drilling on the continental shelf, but the scientific and economic reality is that offshore drilling will not yield more oil for many years, and that oil would then be sold on the world market, reducing domestic oil prices by an insignificant amount. The Center for American Progress has a full ten reasons why lifting the ban on offshore drilling is such a bad idea. As Congress considers lifting the ban, they should heed Rep. Miller’s words and let science inform their decisions.

Roston, a former correspondent for Time, is a senior associate at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. In his narrative, the story of carbon connects these various areas of science and also draws them closer together. Among his intriguing conclusions along the way: the more scientists understand about the element, the more they must work across disciplinary boundaries.

Carbon fuels evolutionary systems and climate change. But it also underscores much of the science that’s changing the way we think about everyday life. Roston joined us at Science Progress to talk about how a close look at carbon can redraw the lines between fields as seemingly disparate as geology and economics. This interview has been edited.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: In the prologue, you quote Shirley Ann Jackson, President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who has said that, “a number of important questions are only able to be addressed at the nexus of the life sciences with the physical, computational, and information sciences.” And you later write that the biological and computational sciences are actually evolving into sort of an “uberscience.” How will these convergences of scientific research tell us more about the natural world, and will they actually be able to help us make smarter policy solutions?

Eric Roston: We’re learning about the natural world at a clip that is just accelerating and it will help us make smarter policy solutions. So, the answer to the question is actually, yes. Now what’s extremely noteworthy is something we’ve seen in the last year: the scientific community really getting its act together and realizing that they need to play a bigger role in policy. If they are not communicating to the public and to policymakers and not informing everyone what their observations of the natural world are, then our policy will not be based on what is occurring in the natural world.

This is something I think about frequently. There was an article from Physics Today in June 2007 and about Dwight Eisenhower and his scientists. Shortly before his death in 1969, he was telling a friend of his, “You know Jim, this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not just themselves.” There is this element that scientists are curious about: how the world works and how to try and explain it to the best of our ability. What is important is the linkage between studying the natural world and making smarter policy initiatives. You introduced me in connection my work at the Nicholas Institute; we actually exist to take science and help bring it to Washington and inform policy. So this is a linkage that is growing.

SP: In the book you talk with people who are working across a huge swath of scientific research. Do you now find yourself working with these same groups, coming together at these same intersections through your work with the Nicholas Institute?

Roston: Yes. One thing we are seeing in universities—possibly more than any other place—is the emergence of new disciplines and the emergence of new categories of thought. And the Carbon Age is my attempt to say: “Look, we divide the world in our experience into administrative and intellectual categories of thought that are dozens—in some cases hundreds of years old. And the science we understand now no longer justifies a lot of these sorts of categories.”

The book is also an attempt to say, “Alright look, lets just take a breather here for a second. Lets peel back some of these categories, look at something very fundamental, and see if we can’t come up with a way to rethink the way we think about the world.” If you retreat to carbon, which is the central structural element of all life and civilization, and you build up from the central element of our civilization, then you understand how energy and climate and personal health and industrial materials are all far more interrelated and interconnected than we give them credit for.

SP: People probably hear about carbon in the mainstream media most often in the context of climate change. There is some recent survey data from the Pew Research Center indicating that the proportion of U.S. citizens who say that there is solid evidence of global warming has dropped since the beginning of last year and is about where it was at the beginning of the summer of 2006. And less than half of the U.S. population, only 47 percent, believe that humans cause global warming. As someone who is an expert on carbon, how do you go about explaining that humans are the cause of global warming?

Eric Roston: The easiest answer is in the IPCC report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the consortium of 3,000 scientists that over the past twenty years has produced four reviews of everything we know about climate science. If you go to Chapter 9 of the Working Group 1 IPCC 2007 report, you have the physical science basis of climate change. There are two crucial figures: figures 9.4 and 9.5 [PowerPoint].

Figure 9.5 shows the amount of climate change from natural forcings. The two biggest natural forcings are generally volcanoes, first and foremost, and solar variability. If you graph only what we know about CO2 coming from volcanoes and solar variability, you can’t even begin to really see an increase in temperature. There is a tremendous gap in this graph between observed natural forcings and observed temperature increases. So in the graph above this you add anthropogenic forcings or man-made forcings, and once you add the man-made gases on top of these natural forcings, it is identical to the temperature rise.

So science moves forward and is emboldened by correlations: correlations from fields that have nothing to do with each other, correlations from people who have never spoken, correlations from within and outside of disciplines. In general, this is where the strength comes from. We have seen the rises in temperature, we know these natural forcings have occurred, and we know these unnatural forcings have occurred and they match—the predictions match—and that’s what makes science trustworthy.

SP: You’ve straddled a huge breadth of scientific research and drawn connections between evolutionary biology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and climate change. The link between them, the thread, is carbon. Can you to talk about how this particular link can actually help us communicate more effectively in public debates over how to teach evolution or climate change?

Roston: It’s a good question, and goes to the very heart of this project. I used to write for Time magazine and this book emerged after I’ve been there for a couple years, and I did spend a lot of time covering energy and climate. And since it’s a general news magazine, you end up covering a lot of things. Then I began to ask myself, “How can I make sense of everything I am covering?”

At the end of 2003, climate change was picking up steam in the private sector; energy prices were on the rise; the price of oil had begun its steady ascent; Lance Armstrong was riding to victory every year on a $6,500 carbon-fiber bicycle; and the Atkins, low-carb diet was careening its way toward a spectacular blowout. So, then I said, “It’s going to be carbon”—that’s going to be my tool for probing all of these things I’ve covered.

I wasn’t a science writer before this; I was a business and technology journalist who had had a lot of questions about science. Once I went back to the carbon atom, as a unifying explainer, from there I ended up writing a book—much to my surprise. I had no idea what this book was going to look like—three years of research that took me in this direction.

So once you have the carbon atom, it bonds with other carbon atoms out in space, they bond with other kinds of atoms, you accrete into big clouds and condense into big stars and planets, and it turns into a book about old earth geology and the origin of life and evolution, and evolution’s effect on the global carbon cycle—and that’s how the book took its shape.

I also realize that there is no reason to call these scientific disciplines what scientists call them. Who cares what scientists call them? (I’ll get in trouble for saying that.) I am holding here the National SMART Grant Department of Education Fields of Study list of majors for students who can apply for these grants. This is a very long list. In fact, this list became infamous in early 2006 when it became clear that the Department of Education removed environmental biology from this list; since then it has been added on. You go through this list, and unless you are majoring in one of these things, there is no reason for guys like you and I to distinguish between biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, molecular biochemistry, molecular biophysics, photobiology, structural biology…and it goes on and on. So what I decided to do was say, “Hey, let’s skip this and talk about it like we are not scientists and just call it ‘carbon science.’”

Follow the carbon out of the volcano, down into the plant, into our stomach; we pass away, and bacteria go out of us and back into the atmosphere, and it eventually washes into the ocean back into the sediment and is subducted into the earth’s mantel. By following the carbon it allows you to restructure, to give a dynamic rather than a static picture of this cycle of how the world works and how various parts of experience correlate.

SP: You write: “Anthropogenic global warming erases the line between ‘biological’ and ‘geological’ timescales as vividly as anything else humans do on this planet.” You also have a great quote from Scott Wing of the Smithsonian Institute who says, “We are plate tectonics.” How do we have to rethink these distinctions between disciplines and between ideas of natural and unnatural planetary events and natural and unnatural disruptions to the carbon cycle?

Roston: One thing that happens if you start to challenge the way we think about things is you see the bigger picture. You see how behaviors in certain parts of the world and in certain industries affect the whole world. There was a headline from a magazine from a couple years ago, a teaser from a front section to a series of book reviews about economics books: “Guess what the hottest new science fad is? Here’s a hint: It’s not geology.” That’s great; that’s a perfectly acceptable teaser to get you into this series of book reviews about economics. The problem is not with the headline; the problem is that we do not see economics or geology as the same thing.

What are people going to think fifty years from now when they look back and say this is a civilization of people completely bored out of their skulls about geology, yet who excavated carbon minerals out of the ground to make their economy run? Economics is geology—it is powered by rocks we pull out of the ground. And the practical repercussions of drawing this distinction between economics and geology is that we only have a price tag of what we get out of the ground, so when we burn that into atmospheric gas, it no longer has any value to the economy—that’s changing, and that’s where federal and international carbon emissions trading policy is going to solve this question.

SP: You have another other great metaphor, when you’re discussing the Stern report and other economic analyses of climate change, and you write that, “Chronic illness is to personal income what global warming is to economic output.” So in the present, we’re really going to have to think critically about a future where we continue to separate geology and economics. Keeping them in separate bins is not going to get us to the right place.

Roston: That is not going to get us to the right place; that is absolutely correct. And there have been a lot of interesting papers by a number of economists around the country and around the world in the last couple of years. Here is how I would frame an answer to this question: economists have a much harder job than geophysicists and geochemists have studying Earth’s carbon cycle. The Earth is a very complicated thing, but it is consistent. Carbon has always flowed through the Earth in the same way; plate tectonics have always shaped the continents. You can always build models that are very powerful because of these Earth processes.

Economists have to do two things: they have to build models that predict how groups of people will behave, and no one knows how to do that with the same precision that geophysicists can do their work. So economists are in this unenviable position of having to build a model on top of the science model, and that adds more variables into the mix and into their analyses.

For me it’s a little weird that so many people doubt climate science, but economists have as much influence as they do. Because when you look at it from this perspective, economists have a much harder job to do, and I don’t envy them, and I’m not putting them down because I work with economists and they are some of the smartest people I know working on some of the hardest problems ever conceived. In the last year or two, you have some people like Martin Weitzmen at Harvard University saying maybe neoclassical economics actually is not suited to a problem as big as climate change. Global warming is a unique geological event.

How do scientists and economists think about it differently? There is a huge gap between how scientists and economists think about climate and I think it’s because they don’t talk to each other as much as you would think. At the center of the discussion that they are not having enough of is the central question of climate change: What does the current generation owe to the future? How do we value the future? Literally, it is a variable in an equation that economists use in cost-benefit analyses to determine how much a climate change policy will cost.

You alluded to the Stern report. The big debate in economics over the last two years has been over how the Stern report broke with economic tradition by choosing a variable in this equation that places a very high value on the future. And because of that, the Stern report has a recommendation that says we should do as much as possible now because it will be cheaper to act now then to wait and let later, richer generations deal with it. That idea is entering the public sphere slowly, but it has not gotten to policy makers yet.

SP: Some people who work in energy and climate policy talk about the “technology trap,” the idea that the solution to climate change is breakthrough technology like hydrogen-powered cars. How do we need to think about science and how do we need to think about technology to get us out of this mess?

Roston: Since there has never been anything like climate change—with the exception of the threat of nuclear war—this is an “all hands on deck” affair. We need to fundamentally change the way we behave in order to have what will be interpreted by future generations as a real attempt at dealing with climate change. I think it’s easy to fall into the technology trap or fall into any little trap along the way that makes climate change seem like something you can parcel out from one aspect of our experience, from one aspect of our national governance, when in fact we really have to reach for every possible technology that might work. One area of conflict: there are a number of firms and scientists who are trying to experiment with pouring iron into the ocean so that it catalyzes biological activity and draws carbon from the atmosphere.

SP: A geoengineering solution?

Roston: Yes. A lot of marine biologists are conducting research showing that this can have negative effects; this can have no net gain; this can add carbon to the atmosphere through the air-sea interaction and the transport of carbon in between them. I read all the papers that come out, and I’ve talked to some of the people who run these companies, and it is easy to come to the conclusion that we need to try everything and that businesses as usual will alter the climate in places that people have settled for tens of thousands of years and make them no longer good places to have settlements. I think that scale gets lost in the noise.

SP: What’s important to remember about carbon when people are thinking about energy or environmental policy?

Roston: You can tell a big story; you can tell a single story about our experience by looking at carbon. As I said earlier, energy and climate and personal health and pharmaceuticals and industrial materials and all these topics that we treat as stove-pipe categories all become episodes of this grand story of the carbon cycle. As a book, I hope people enjoy it. I spent a lot of time taking this material and trying to make it fun and easy to read. I hope it is an organizing tool for helping people think about the way we think about things.

On Wednesday, President Bush argued that, “Congress must face a hard reality: Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels—or even higher—our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now.” Unfortunately, the president’s proposal to end the moratorium on offshore drilling in sensitive coastal areas would not lower gas prices. The science contradicts President Bush, and arguments from legislators that the U.S. should open offshore fields for drilling are simply the latest instance of federal policymaking that willfully ignores scientific evidence.

According to an Energy Information Administration study, drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf would increase domestic oil production 7 percent by 2030 compared to a reference case, but “because oil prices are determined on the international market…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.” Further, it would take years for production to begin, and the nation lacks both the infrastructure necessary to conduct offshore drilling and the capacity necessary to refine extracted oil. The science is clear: offshore drilling in sensitive coastal areas would not even come close to alleviating the energy crisis. But these aren’t the only reasons; the Center for American Progress has a full “Ten Reasons Not to Lift the Offshore Drilling Moratorium.”

The president’s proposal demonstrates both a lack of imagination and a refusal to incorporate science into executive decision-making. Instead of trying to produce more oil, the United State should be researching technologies that would move us beyond our dependence on oil. The real solution to the energy crisis—and to the climate crisis—is to innovate, become more efficient, and move forward. That’s why offshore drilling in sensitive areas is a bad idea. For a long-term plan, it is remarkably short-sighted.

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. From the Cartoonist Group.

The Lieberman-Warner debate will provide occasion for plenty of misinformation about climate change science. In particular, we can expect Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)—who will forever be remembered for describing global warming as possibly “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”—to continue his basic strategy of saying anything, no matter how incredible, to muddy the waters on the issue.

Preventing the worst impacts of global warming will have very real positive economic benefits, yet those always seem to get short shrift once the argument gets onto economic turf.

But although they’re certainly not over, the days of battling over climate science do appear on the wane. Simply put, it’s becoming less and less respectable to be an outright global warming “denier” these days. Those who continue to oppose capping our domestic greenhouse gas emissions are more likely to couch their central arguments in economic terms—i.e., by arguing that taking strong action will be too expensive, and so we’d be better off just trying to adapt.

Right now, a book that’s apparently having quite a run in the UK does just that. Entitled An Appeal to Reason, it’s by Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and it argues that overall, the net “cost” of global warming won’t be all that bad—mankind will show a surprising ability to adapt to the changes it brings. But, adds Lawson, the price of truly stopping the juggernaut, if stop it we must, would be massive: a dramatic rise in the global price of energy and thus considerable damage to economies.

We can expect to hear similar economic charges brought against the fairly modest (and moderate) Lieberman-Warner bill, which represents a starting point—but certainly no final solution—to the global warming problem. A recent analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency found that the legislation would reduce U.S. emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and by 56 percent by 2050—hardly strong enough to really put us in the climatic safe zone at a time when scientists think we ultimately need an 80 percent cut in global emissions. Yet according to the EPA, even the Lieberman-Warner bill’s relatively modest cuts could reduce U.S. GDP considerably: by up to 3.8 percent in 2030 and up to 6.9 percent in 2050. Expect the bill’s less even-handed opponents to make the damage sound even more drastic, especially at a time when gas prices are already punishing consumers.

Still, scanning the EPA study, one sentence sticks out in particular: “The economic benefits of reducing emissions were not determined for this analysis.” The arguments of Lawson suffer from a similar flaw—preventing the worst impacts of global warming will have very real positive economic benefits, yet those always seem to get short shrift once the argument gets onto economic turf.

So to really get any sense of climate change’s true price tag, you have to consider the total global cost for all impacts.

Granted, it’s not really possible to put a price tag on, say, a Pacific island state that runs the risk of going under water—or on an ice-covered North Pole. Or on polar bears and the ecosystems that support them. But unchecked global warming will have many costs that can indeed be monetized—and some estimates suggest that even over the short term, they’re comparable to the U.S. cost of the Lieberman-Warner bill. Take, for example, a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which attempted to update the famous 2006 UK Stern Report—which found that by 2200 global warming’s costs could be simply massive, equaling 5 to 20 percent of the world’s GDP—and apply it to the United States in particular. NRDC projects that if we don’t deal with global warming at all, costs to the U.S. could be as high as 3.6 percent of GDP by 2100, and that’s just from four projected impacts (hurricane losses, sea level rise damage to real estate, rising energy demand, and water supply costs to battle drought).

There are problematic aspects to the NRDC study—for instance, the hurricane issue is very murky, and it’s hard to tell whether the study authors took its complexity into account—but there can be little doubt it’s a step in the right direction. It is simply ridiculous to presume that the economic impacts of global warming won’t be anything to fret about, or to leave them out of discussion. On the contrary, depending on how quickly we act to stave off the problem, those impacts could be absolutely massive. And they ought to put to shame any short term whining about the expense of dealing with climate change.

For after all, the NRDC study only looked at four projected climate change impacts as they affect the United States in particular. Global warming will have many other impacts too, and is expected to take an even more severe toll on developing countries than here. So to really get any sense of climate change’s true price tag, you have to consider the total global cost for all impacts—including the potential cost of truly catastrophic scenarios like dramatic sea level rise that would overwhelm the world’s coastal cities (a possibility that, while not yet locked in, becomes more and more likely if we delay on this issue). Combine together all these expenses with the “cost” of losing so many things whose value aren’t even calculable—species, places, cultures, glaciers, ecosystems—and then you get a true sense of the possible “price.”

And as economic critics of climate change legislation constantly downplay this true price of global warming and selectively emphasize the cost of action, they use another sleight of hand, one that has been exposed by Center for American Progress senior fellow Dan Weiss. Weiss points out that climate change legislation, like the Lieberman-Warner bill, will spur considerable innovation in the renewable energy sector, which will both cut energy costs and reduce emissions simultaneously.

I don’t have a lot of hope for the passage of Lieberman-Warner this year. But I honestly do believe, once you think everything through, that it’s impossible to argue that it’s “worth it” to do nothing on climate change.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy sources increased a total of 1.6 percent last year, or 96 million metric tons. To give this number some perspective, it’s as if we added 14 million more cars to the road. Alexandra Kougentakis points out that this “single largest year-over-year increase since Bush took office.”

The biggest increases were in emissions from residential and commercial electricity, which rose a combined 3 percent. Residentially, this is no doubt largely due to increased heating and cooling from last year. Commercially, the number one emissions producer in 2007 was coal-fired electric plants, which added 35.3 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006 than 2007. But natural gas plants, which have been seen as way to reduce emissions, actually saw a greater increase in their total carbon dioxide emissions—35.6 million more metric tons.

Bush may have claimed, after the 2006 decrease, that, “We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment.” But that it clearly not the case.

We need bigger, more effective ideas if we’re going to reign in emissions from power plants. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act is unlikely to pass through Congress this year, but it does lay the groundwork for the kind of plan that we need to set ourselves on a course to steadily reduce emissions.

The bill would establish a carbon cap-and-trade program, which would encourage companies to upgrade and innovate their systems in order to reduce emissions by setting a cap and putting a price tag on the amount of carbon dioxide that they can produce. It may seem like a stretch to think that we’ll be able to get utility companies to buy or trade credits for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, but there’s already a successful model of just such a program.

Back in 1990, the Clean Air Act set up a cap-and-trade system for the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain. Not only did the program meet its goals; it surpassed them. Companies reduced their emissions faster and at one-tenth of the predicted cost.

We should let these new numbers from The Energy Information Administration serve as a wake up call. Just keeping our fingers crossed isn’t enough to make carbon dioxide emissions go down. We need a plan.

He went on to emphasize the importance of identifying capable individuals who can fill science policy positions in advance of the next administration, and ensuring a smooth transition. “There is often a great mutual incomprehension between people who run the machinery before,” and those who subsequently assume those roles, he said.

Despite the fact that new advisors and administrators will assume roles as science policy makers, Marburger said that the landscape of science policy will not change. “The future is likely to be very similar to the past, regardless of who the President is, who the administration is,” he said. Broad changes in science policy values take substantial effort by many people over time, he said. To support this, he referred to stability of non-defense R&D as a total percentage of non-defense discretionary spending over the past several decades:

(Source: “Does Science Policy Really Matter?,” Daniel Sarewitz; AAAS, based on Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2007 Historical Tables.)

Marburger went on to discuss the increases in R&D funding during his tenure. “There’s a much greater amount of research money on the table than there was at the beginning of this administration,” he said.

The Bush Administration has indeed supported important areas of science funding. His slides showed the upward incline of funding since 2001. According to the AAAS, “overall federal investment in R&D would increase $4.9 billion or 3.5 percent to $147.4 billion” in the administration’s FY2009 budget. But AAAS and Science Progress advisor John Irons point out what Marburger failed to mention: despite these increases in dollar amounts, boosts to federal research funding have not kept pace with inflation for years.

Funding decisions are ultimately up to Congress, but questions of “how much” are simply one element of science policy. Another is the responsibility to provide clear and accurate scientific advice to the President and to Congress so that they can make informed decisions on public policy. Marburger is absolutely right that we need to start thinking now about who the capable individuals are that will fill science policy positions within the next administration, because the first job of those people won’t be ensuring more funding for R&D, it will be restoring scientific integrity to executive decision making. From inaction and delay on addressing climate change, to short-sighted policies on stem cell research, to the obliteration the EPA’s ability to protect citizens from environmental contaminates, the current administration’s assault on scientific integrity is well-documented and wearying.

The next President will need a team of science advisors who can help direct the billions of dollars the federal government spends on scientific research and development into efforts that build a low-carbon economy enhanced by innovation and opportunity for all workers, and a healthcare system that serves everyone who in the country. And they’ll have to push back hard against those who continue to wage war on science.

Bob Dinneen, CEO and President of of the Renewable Fuels Association testified that ethanol production has a very small effect on food prices, and may actual be keeping them down. He told committee members that corn growers heeded the market signal sent by the RFS mandate last year, producing an additional 2.5 billion bushels of corn over the previous year’s yield, of which only 600 million bushels went towards producing ethanol. Thus, he argued, there was actually an increase in available corn.

Dinneen followed up by citing research which shows that only two percent of the world supply of corn is used goes into ethanol production and that only three percent of food price increases was attributable to that production. He said the main driver of increased food prices was the price of oil. Removing the RFS, he said, would only increase the price of energy, driving up food prices even further.

Rick Tolman, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association backed up Dinneen’s claim, explaining that the main culprit of increased food prices is the price of oil, which plays a significant role in each part of the food production chain. Tolman cited a recent study suggesting that a $1-per-gallon increase in the price of gas has three times the impact on food prices than a $1-per-bushel increase in the price of corn. He also testified that only 19 cents of each consumer dollar in the United States can be attributed to farm products such as grain, oil seeds, and meat. Labor costs 38 cents, and transportation, packaging, energy, and other costs make up the remaining 43 cents. He cited USDA economist Ephraim Liebtag, who calculates that a 50 percent increase in corn prices would translate to an increase in retail food prices of less than one percent.

Don’t remove the mandates, but don’t increase them either was the recommendation from Scott Faber, Vice President of Federal Affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He acknowledged that many factors are involved in the recent spike, “including increasing global food demand, export and other restrictions, adverse weather in some countries, commodity speculation, and higher energy prices.” He said that the one factor that is under the control of Congress is the package of “mandates and subsidies diverting food into fuel production.” Congress should be mindful, he said, that rising food prices are a significant challenge to the poorest twenty percent of Americans who spend about one-third of their after-tax income on food.

The food price spike has also pushed millions of people around the world in to poverty, he said, forcing food aid programs to ration their supplies. He asked Congress to revisit the mandate schedule; to push harder for second- and third- generation biofuels; and to increase support of international food programs and agricultural development.

Fortunately, there is a sufficient supply of biofuel feedstocks that do not compete with food crops: see “Alternative Cellulosic Biomass By the Numbers.”

Bob Dinneen, CEO and President of the Renewable Fuels Association, defended the RFS, saying that it “makes more sense today then when it was passed.” He argued that the RFS plays a major role in reducing the price of gasoline and U.S. dependence on foreign oil; curtailing greenhouse gas emissions; creating new jobs; and revitalizing rural America.

He claimed that this year’s mandate, if met, will bring GHG emission reductions equivalent to taking 2.5 million cars off the road. He also addressed the recent Searchinger report arguing that biofuel production may actually cause increased GHG emissions. Dinneen cited a response to the study questioning its underlying model and said that more research is needed to address the issue. Searchinger himself has countered such critiques of the study, saying that its conclusions hold regardless of adjustments to the model.

Dinneen also testified that biofuels are also lowering oil prices, citing a recent Merrill Lynch report suggesting world oil prices would be 15 percent higher without the current expansion of biofuel production. He called for greater investment in delivery methods and transportation infrastructure to bring ethanol to where its needed quickly and cheaply.

Charles Drevna, President of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association offered an opposing view, asking Congress to do away with the RFS and instead let the market dictate the integration of alternative (note: not “renewable”) fuels into the transportation fuel mix. He told the hearing audience that the mandates not only distort the market, but stifle competition and innovation.

He took issue with Dinneen’s claim of lower gas prices from the introduction of biofuels, saying that adding ethanol to fuel does not actually translate into cost savings at the pump. Because current biofuels have less energy content then gasoline, cars end up requiring more fuel, which offsets lower prices he said. To solidify his claim, Drevna cited a report which found that E85 ethanol cost eighty cents more per gallon then gasoline when its price was adjusted for its lower combustion efficiency.

Drevna also disagreed with Dinneen that biofuels are reducing the cost of gasoline because ethanol production is subsidized, offering the appearance of lower prices. But he failed to note that the government has been very generous in supporting oil production in recent years. As Sam Davis and Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress point out, in 2004 and 2005, big oil companies received tax breaks worth over $17 billion over the next decade. This assistance, they also say, “continues even as BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell just posted record first quarter 2008 profits—a combined total of $20.8 billion.”

If the ethanol subsidy is removed, Drevna argued, ethanol would be uneconomical in comparison to gasoline on a thermal energy scale. He also claimed that the U.S. lacks the necessary infrastructure to meet the mandates, leaving refiners to unfairly pay the price of penalties imposed by Congress. He asked committee members to do away with the current tariff on imported ethanol to afford flexibility to refiners trying to meet these increased RFS mandates.

Amid growing controversy, Subcommittee On Energy and Air Quality Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) called the hearing to revisit the RFS just five months after Congress increased the mandate as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which passed at the end of last year. The polarized hearing left committee members with a wide array of considerations to mull over as they decide the fate of the RFS in the coming months. To make sense of it all, Science Progress breaks down the hearing to discuss its varying themes. First up, what’s right with the RFS and ways to make it better.

The hearing opened up with testimony from Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD) who introduced her bill, H.R. 5236, better known as the Renewable Biomass Facilitation Act. The bill intends to expand the RFS to allow woody biomass collected from both federal and private forests to be used in the production of biofuel that would count towards the RFS. Woody biomass—the byproducts of forest management practices—are usually burned or left to rot, releasing carbon and methane into the atmosphere and could be put to better use as feedstock for biofuels, she argued. Most committee members used their allotted time to heap congratulations on Rep. Sandlin and pledge support for her bill. Using residual agricultural and forestry biomass as biofuel feedstock would avoid competition with food crops.

Committee members then heard from Robert Meyers, associate assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation who touted the President’s proposed Alternative Fuel Standard, which would replace the RFS in 2010. The AFS would include alternative, but non-renewable fuels such as natural gas and coal-to-liquid (which is a boondoggle), hydrogen, and plug-in hybrids, in addition to those renewable fuels already included in the RFS. While the AFS ups the required amount of alternative fuels in the country’s fuel supply, it gives the EPA discretion to adjust or waive requirements to protect the economy or environment from any detrimental impacts of biofuel production. He also revealed that the EPA’s report on the environmental and health impacts of biofuels—requested by Congress in 2005—will be released in the coming weeks.

Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the National Resources Defense Council, praised the RFS for its forward-looking approach, but pressed Congress to ensure proper safeguards are in place to protect the environment and food prices. He commended the RFS for properly defining lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for biofuels to include the entire production process, as well as land use changes, which can severely alter the effectiveness of biofuels in reducing GHG emissions. He noted how the RFS requires the vast majority of new biofuels derived from cellulosic biomass to reduce lifecycle GHG emissions by 60 percent, a step away from a “more is better” policy to a “better is better” policy.

Greene recommended that Congress push the EPA to study environmental consequences of biofuels to ensure that science drives policy, not politics. He asked Congress to adopt a cap-and-trade program as part of a comprehensive approach to reduce GHG emissions and to reform the current ethanol tax credit to be technology-neutral and performance-based. Such an approach would incentivize biofuel innovation and keep Congress from picking the winners and losers in the biofuel marketplace, he argued.

Titled “Making Carbon Capture & Sequestration Work,” the public event focused on the economic and technical feasibility of CCS technology. The first panel tackled “The Business Case for CCS,” recognizing, unlike the presentations in North Dakota, the economic costs connected to inaction on carbon capture. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-MN) highlighted economic penalties right at the start of the meeting, pointing out the likely adoption in the near future of a cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions. Dooley emphasized the need for a strong long-term commitment to CCS as a climate mitigation strategy, citing the environmental consequences of inaction. He was, however, one of the few at the meeting expressing a belief that climate change mitigation policy will have immediate value. While technical and industry representatives demurred on this point, they agreed that a regulatory framework with incentives for the adoption of CCS would be essential to its success, they were somewhat less enthusiastic about government regulation in the immediate future.

The session also offered better advice to Senators than last week’s field hearing by including representatives from European energy firms and governments. It is no secret that the EU is far ahead of the U.S. in its environmental and energy policies, or that the U.S. can learn from Europe’s experience, avoid its mistakes, and build on the strengths of its approach. Crisp explained a UK-sponsored competition for the country’s first large-scale CCS project. The entries must employ post-combustion technology, which can be used to retrofit existing power plants, and the winner of the competition will receive significant funding from the British government. Crisp said that the competition was intended as a model for the rest of the world to follow in the future development of coal-fired power plants. The Bush administration withdrew its support in January for the first commercial-scale CCS demonstration project in the U.S.

In contrast to coal industry’s pessimistic tone on CCS technology, this briefing made it clear that while it won’t be easy, CCS will be a crucial tool in future energy development and in the fight against climate change. To learn more about how carbon capture works, see the Center for American Progress’s Carbon Capture and Sequestration 101.

Alexandra Kougentakis is a Fellows Assistant at the Center for American Progress.

The technically complex nature of CCS encompasses the mineral, geological, and engineering sciences, and the inputs from specialists in any of these fields would have been an important contribution. The first panel was comprised of three government officials and the second panel of five industry representatives. Among the government officials were directors from the Interior department, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. The industry representatives included officers of both the fossil fuel industry itself, as well as directors of regional CCS partnerships, which have been organized by the Department of Energy. Industry reps explained that while current R&D efforts are managed and supported by the government, operations are actually in the hands of private industry.

Perhaps ignoring the state of the science behind CCS was intentional, since the purpose of the hearing was to present the challenges of the deployment of CCS technology. Yet a rigorous evaluation demands independent authentication from the research community, making it difficult to take these testimonies at face value. Towards the end of his presentation, Gary Loop the Chief Operating Officer and Senior VP of the Dakota Gasification Company, described the prospects for CCS as ranging from “hopeless” to “it might work,” prompting an astonished senator to ask, “do you have anything more positive to say?”

It is only to be expected that industry would demur at calls for change and technological innovation, given the motivating factor of the bottom line. But CCS is essential to the future of coal use in America. As the Center for American Progress has noted: “In the United States alone, about 145 gigawatts of new power from coal-fired plants are projected to be built by 2030, resulting in CO₂ emissions of 790 million metric tons per year in the absence of emission controls. By comparison, annual U.S. emissions of CO₂ from all sources in 2005 were about 6 billion metric tons.” In order to craft energy policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and supports the rapid development of CCS, Congress needs clear information about the where the technology stands. CAP outlined the path to CCS in a report released last year, “Global Warming and the Future of Coal.”

The panelists discussed ongoing research efforts in CCS technology, in addition to difficult questions about sequestration site appropriateness, transport of sequestered CO₂, economic feasibility, and uncertainty about geological consequences. They also tackled the tricky legal and political issues, including custody rights, liability, and appropriate designation of the CO₂, which is currently considered a mineral, but may be re-categorized as a pollutant.

John Harju of the PCOR partnership was particularly emphatic about the importance of retaining enhanced oil recovery, which involves pumping captured CO2 into depleted oil fields in order to force out more oil, as an acceptable use of sequestered CO₂. Mr. Harju’s concern regards policies under consideration that would exclude EOR as an option for sequestered CO₂. Gordon Criswell, the manager of the Montana division of the PPL power corporation undercut Harju’s argument and tried to restrain enthusiasm about CCS and EOR operations, citing difficulties with pressurized pipelines. Wide adoption, he said, would necessitate a massive pipeline construction effort for the quantity of sequestered CO₂.

But those minor points of disagreement were overshadowed by the strong consensus among the industry representatives about the many impediments to CCS as a significant means of emissions reductions from coal combustion. Scott Klara of the National Energy Technology Laboratory conveyed a similar government perspective. He said that the on a commercial scale, CCS would cause an 80 percent price increase in electricity from a new pulverized coal plant, and a 35 percent increase from a new advanced gasification-based plant. Nearly all the panelists emphasized the need for extensive government funding and flexible regulation. Mr. Criswell cited the Bingaman-Specter Low Carbon Economy Act (S.1766) as adhering “most closely with PPL’s climate change principles.” Not surprisingly, the recent EPA analysis of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) indicated that in a cross-comparison of emissions control bills, S. 1766 was the weakest, with the greatest lenience towards industry.

Both bills establish cap-and-trade programs on greenhouse gases, but differ in their details. Lieberman-Warner would funnel up to a quarter of all technology funds from the allowance auctions to sequestration technology, a strong impetus for innovation, while the safety valve provision of Bingaman-Specter, which industry sees as a protective measure, actually amounts to being a disincentive for technological progress.

The fact is that if the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act is enacted, both of these studies will prove to be totally wrong.

Why? The short answer is that they predict future clean up results and costs based on a snap shot of current technologies. And history has taught us that industry almost always finds better, and cheaper ways to meet requirements. We can call this the innovation factor.

The best correlating example of how this has played out in the past is the Clean Air Act of 1990. The bill laid out a program for reducing the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain that is very similar to the carbon cap-and-trade program proposed by the Lieberman Warner bill.

Studies released in advance of the Clean Air Act vote in Congress predicted significant economic costs, including compliance costs of $2.7 to 4.0 billion a year, sulfur credits in excess of $700, increased electricity rates, and job losses. Yet when the final tallies came in, it turned out that the actual costs were only one tenth of what studies predicted; electricity prices actually went down; and the fewer-than-expected coal mine job losses were actually due to productivity improvement and other economic factors.

The Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act is far from perfect. It could require more greenhouse gas reductions in the early years and by 2050. It gives away, rather than auctions off, too many allowances early on, which could decrease the revenue to aid low and middle income families, invest in clean energy, and help developing nations adapt to the effects of global warming. And it fails to establish a new source performance standard for all new coal fired power plants to speed the development and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.

Yet even with these shortcomings, history tells us that the bill will provide a strong and respectable first step in the urgent effort to reduce global warming pollution.

Dr. Raymond Orbach, Undersecretary for Science at the DOE and C.H. Albright Jr., Undersecretary of Energy at the DOE snubbed the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing at the last moment yesterday, suggesting that the subcommittee unfairly changed its protocol to allow outside experts at the budget hearing, a policy not approved by the DOE.

Representative Jerry Costello (D-IL) was disappointed by DOE representatives and argued that the committee, and not the Administration, have the right to decide hearing protocol. By refusing to testify, the DOE is setting a bad precedent, he said, undermining the ability of Congress to provide oversight and effectively determine budget priorities in the appropriations process.

Rep. Judy Biggert (R-SC) supported the DOE decision, claiming the committee lacked uniformity in hearing procedures, pointing out that the NOAA and NASA witnesses testified with no outside experts. Chairman Nick Lampson (D-TX) countered, saying that other Federal agencies like the NSF and NIST testified with outside experts and asked that the DOE witnesses’ written testimony be excluded from the record. After an appeal by Rep Bob Inglis (R-SC) and a fifteen minute recess for deliberation, the representatives decided not to include their written testimony in the record.

The committee members generally offered praise for the budget when the hearing finally turned to appropriation discussion. Members applauded the boost to physical sciences mandated by the COMPETES Act along with appropriations for ITER, an international collaboration on a nuclear fusion reactor that was jeopardized by the lack of funding support in the 2008 omnibus budget. On the other hand, committee members expressed concerns about the funding cuts to many programs including energy efficiency, weatherization research, and solar research; initiatives supported by the Energy Policy Act; and FutureGen, the world’s first coal-fueled plant with near-zero emissions; they were also concerned about the impact of earmarks on research funding.

Steve Isakowitz, the DOE’s Chief Financial Officer, testified that the 2009 budget was largely unchanged from previous years. He highlighted the increases in biomass fuel research, the loan guarantee program that will help facilitate the move of research discoveries from the lab to application in industry, and said changes in the marketplace and private investments justified revisions of FutureGen project. The project, whose costs have ballooned, was canceled to focus on multiple smaller projects that demonstrate carbon capture and sequestration at power plant project sites.

Dr. Arthur Bienenstock, President of the American Physical Society, chose to highlight the detriment of the 2008 budget to physical sciences which caused layoffs at the Fermilab, the International Linear Collider and cut into U.S. leadership in the field. He testified in support of the 2009 budget, saying that it does much to undo the damage inflicted by the 2008 omnibus, but warned members to resist short-term thinking about investments in the energy and physical sciences. He cited the 700 proposals in energy research that were rejected by the DOE because of the 2008 budget and the unforeseen long-term effects it will have on science as young people turn away from pursing scientific careers on account of dwindling resources.

Mark Gaffigan, Acting Director of the Government Accountability Office’s Natural Resources and Environment Team stressed the need for investment in renewable energy technology. In his testimony, Gaffigan argued that not even the oil crisis of the 1970s did much to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. Thirty years ago, fossil fuels made up 93 percent of the U.S. energy portfolio, and today it makes up 85 percent. Citing a recent GAO report, Gaffigan said the DOE research budget for renewable, fossil, and nuclear energy fell 92 percent from 1978 to 1998, only making a slight recovery in the past decade. He recommended that Congress should continue to increase funding on advanced energy technologies which could help spur innovation, citing estimates that clean energy technology will receive 7 trillion dollars in investments worldwide over the next 50 years.

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) offered a complaint against the “irrational exuberance” for hydrogen technology. He argued that hydrogen technology is not efficient and will be useless as a viable clean energy until further advancements in fuel cell technology take place. He supported the cuts of funding to hydrogen research and warned against the same sort of hype for biofuels.

In the past, electricity generation by natural gas eclipsed solar thermal power because it offered a much lower price per unit of power, as The New York Times explains. The price of natural gas has risen, though, and demand for solar thermal power (which even now carries a high cost of about 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour) has boomed. As economies of scale promise to reduce the price of solar thermal to around 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, it is becoming an attractive component of emerging low-carbon energy portfolios. Ten thermal solar power plants are now planned for construction in Arizona, California, and Nevada, including Solana, the largest one in the world near Phoenix, Arizona. Their output would equal that of three nuclear reactors, but they could be built in two years, instead of the decade or longer required for nuclear plants–a crucial consideration, given the urgency of carbon emissions reductions. However, solar thermal plants, because of their sheer size, can have a tremendous impact on desert ecosystems, and they often require long transmission lines for their connections to the grid.

Today, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming heard from Barbara Lockwood, manager of renewable energy at Arizona Public Service Company, about the Solana solar power project in Arizona. The hearing focused on the need for greater investment in renewable energy technologies to help jump start a sputtering economy and foster domestic job creation. According to Ms. Lockwood, the Solana project will create 1,500 construction jobs and 85 permanent operations jobs and is estimated to bring one billion dollars to the Arizona economy as well as 300 to 400 million dollars of tax revenue over the thirty year life of the plant.

She encouraged Congress to renew the Investment Tax Credit, which is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Without a long term extension of the ITC, she said, the Solana project is not only unaffordable, but unlikely to be completed. She asked for an eight-year extension and a revision of the ITC rules to make it available to public utilities. Current restrictions on the credit force a third-party owner to use the ITC, bringing unneeded risk and cost to the system.

Image: flickr.com/Desert Vu