Stimulating a revolution in sustainable energy technology

Environment

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 10-21

  Weiss, Charles ^a   Bonvillian, William ^b  

^a Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service

^b MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 71949092372     PISSN: 00139157     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3200/ENV.51.4.10-21     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Public Law 111-5, 17 February 2009, 111th Congress, 1st Session.
2. Princeton professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala's 15 "wedges" - established practices or technologies that can be scaled up by 2050 to stabilize carbon in the atmosphere - are among the best documented. R. Socolow and S. W. Pacala, "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check," Scientific American, no. 3 (September 2006): 50-57.
3. Ibid.
4. See, for example, N. Stern, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (London: H. M. Treasury, 2006), http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern- review -report.htm (accessed 29 May 2009).
5. The source for the data in this paragraph is G. Nemet and D. Kammen, "U.S. Energy R&D: Declining Investment, Increasing Need, and the Feasibility of Expansion," Energy Policy 35, no. 1 (2007): 746-55.
6. In his report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, science advisor Vannevar Bush extolled the merits of federal support to basic research to drive new technologies and suggested establishing what would later become the National Science Foundation. V. Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 1-11, http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/ vbush1945.htm (accessed 28 May 2009);
7. discussed in D. E. Stokes, Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings University Press, 1997).
8. L. Branscomb and P. Auerswald, Between Invention and Innovation: An Analysis of Funding for Early-State Technology Development, NIST GCR 02-841 (Gaith-ersburg, MD: Economic Assessment Office, Advanced Technology Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2002), http://www.atp.nist.gov/ eao/gcr02 -841/contents.htm (accessed 28 May 2009).
9. V. W. Ruttan, Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
10. V. W. Ruttan, Technology Growth and Development: An Induced Innovation Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11. The analysis summarized here and the technology assessments on which it is based are found at greater length in C. Weiss and W. B. Bonvillian, Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
12. A disruptive technology begins in lower-profit market segments ignored by larger firms (which typically concentrate on adding extra functions to high-profit products) and improves, expands, and displaces well-established incumbent technologies. Examples include the personal computer, which displaced mainframes, and low-cost airlines, which displaced legacy carriers. See C. M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 1997).
13. The America Competes Act, Public Law 110-69, 9 August 2007, 110th Congress, 1st session, S. 5012.
14. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, note 1.
15. W B. Bonvillian, "Power Play, the DARPA Model and U.S. Energy," The American Interest 2, no. 2 (2006): 39-48.
16. Legislation to create such an entity has now been proposed by energy committee leaders in Congress. See, 21st Century Energy Technology Deployment Act, 110th Cong., 2nd sess., S. 3233, Congressional Record 154, no. 114, daily ed. (11 July 2008);
17. and Clean Energy Investment Bank Act, 110th Cong., 2nd sess., S. 2730, Congressional Record 154, no. 38, daily ed. (6 March 2008). Pending energy legislation in both the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the House Energy and Commerce Committee is considering such a financing entity within the Department of Energy.
18. Running a single 100-watt incandescent light bulb for 24 hours a day for a year requires 714 pounds of coal; a 500-megawatt plant would light 4 million of these bulbs for a year. For a further comparison, the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy projects that the United States will have added about 77 gigawatts of generating capacity from all fuel types between 2008 and 2015, http://www.ea.doe.gov/ oiaf/aeo/electricity.html (accessed 29 May 2009).
19. Climate mitigation is in China and India's direct interest because the melting of the Himalayan and other mountain glaciers is beginning to affect the flow of the great rivers of Asia - the Yangtze, the Indus, and the Ganges, to cite only three - that provide the bulk of these countries' irrigation and urban water supply. For a general overview of the problem of melting glaciers worldwide, see B. Orlove, "Glacier Retreat: Reviewing the Limits of Human Adaptation to Climate Change," Environment 51, no. 3 (2009): 22-34.
20. Initiative for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Task Force, Common Challenge, Collaborative Response: A Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change (Washington, DC, and Arlington, VA: Asia Society and Pew Center on Global Warming, 2009).
21. Full discussion of climate and trade is found in T Houser et al., Leveling the Carbon Playing Field (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics and World Resources Institute, 2008);
22. and G. C. Hufbauer et al., Global Warming and the World Trading System (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009).
23. These discussions might be modeled on the bilateral U.S.-Japanese discussions of economic policy, motivated by trade tensions that took place during the first Bush administration. A second model is the multilateral discussions among European finance ministries that preceded the submission of unified proposals for Marshall Plan assistance derived from agreed calculations of the requirements for foreign exchange needed to finance European reconstruction after World War II.
24. L. Cohen and R. Noll, The Technology Pork Barrel (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1991).
25. The Climate Security Act, 110th Cong., 2nd sess., S. 3036, Congressional Record 154, no. 85, daily ed. (22 May 2008);
26. original legislation introduced as America's Climate Security Act of 2007, 110th Cong., 1st sess., S. 2191, Congressional Record 153, no. 158, daily ed. (18 October 2007).
27. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, note 1.
28. International Energy Agency (IEA), Energy Technology Perspectives 2008: Scenarios and Strategies to 2050 (Paris: IEA, 2008).
29. L. Browning and J. Shetler, Sematech: Saving the U.S. Semiconductor Industry (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2000).