PESTLE

Green technology and hype

Well, many of you may have been surprised to learn that the number of new patents in medical technology has been declining for years. I was. But now we learn, thanks to WIPO, that the same is true for environmental technology. Every year the decline has been 1.1%. If we actually do need to save the world, you'd think it would be growing. In the sexiest areas of technology, new patents can grow by 5% per year or even more.

So, with all the hype about how alternative technology is needed to replace fossil fuels, which country is actually doing the most work about making alternative technology a reality? For solar, it's Japan, head and shoulders above the crowd--between 2001 and 2005, Japanese companies filed over 9,000 patents for solar energy technology. Second place, with only 2000 patents, went to South Korea.

Japan's lead is even greater in fuel cell technology patents--over 12,000 patents in the same time frame. The U.S. was second--with 2,900 patents.

For wind power, the leader is... Germany! in the 5-year span, they generated 1,383 patents, narrowly edging out--Japan, with 1,336.

So who is serious about alternative energy technologies?

Green Technology Goals

Should policy aim at specific goals or at enabling mechanisms to reach those goals?

I ask because American energy efficiency improves on average by 2% per year. In the past, we have sort of squandered that efficiency by asking motors to carry a greater load and by getting newer and bigger appliances.

If, on the other hand, we simply used these efficiency gains to reduce energy consumption, by 2050 we would be using half the energy we're using today. That's all we would have to do.

Now, if we also started reducing the load on motors, turbines, etc., by driving cars that weighed less and plugging gaps in our homes, we might be able to do it quicker.

And that's where policy should point--we know that new technology is just around the corner, but we don't know which technology will best serve our needs or when it will be of optimum efficiency to adopt it. So why not focus our energy on a proven way of getting to where we want to be? Just asking...

Interesting discussion on the subject here.

In my heart of hearts, I don't think we'll double alternative generating capacity any time soon, although I think we'll make significant progress. In that same black heart of mine, I don't think we'll recycle and re-use much more than we currently do. But I do think we can weatherize houses and buildings a lot. I think we can move a lot of people onto public transport. I think that telecommuting will take people out of the commute.

And in my heart of hearts, I do think we'll get to where we need to be. Not in five years, although I think we'll start being hopeful by then. But in 40 years. And I think that's soon enough.

Green Technology and Pres. Obama's Energy Policy

As Kevin Drum has so succinctly pointed out, President Obama's recently announced Cap and Trade policy, properly executed, will reduce overall emissions without overly tight management of how it is achieved. Further targeting through a modest carbon tax can supplement this. An increase in the gas tax can push consumption down. Investment in alternative generating technologies and in a smart grid for transmission is long overdue and badly needed.

In short, President Obama's energy policy is really, really good. I voted for him and I am still surprised at how good he has been in the past six weeks.

How can technology support his policy? Perhaps I should rephrase the question--how can society use technology to steer towards his policy ends?

Given what he is preparing to spend money on (weatherizing residences and pushing broadband infrastructure, and a more intelligent power grid), it appears that the easy win is broad encouragement of more working (and schooling) from home. This may be a bit easier than it would have been just a year ago, as recessions usually generate a higher start-up rate of small, home-based businesses. Distance learning and distance training are getting easier and more widely accepted, and can reduce education costs for students as well as institutions. Employers can retain more staff by spending less on infrastructure.

What am I missing?

George Will and the Madness of Bloggers

One reason that it's tough to slog through the blogs is that they are susceptible to a rigid madness of dogma, a sort of hysteria that prevents them from looking at an issue with any sort of reason. This hysteria is the same for both 'left' and 'right' wing bloggers, and it means that it's tough to trust what you read out there.

George Will wrote a column in the Washington Post about climate change. (And he offended me in his first paragraph: "Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong." I guess pundits don't need forecasts.) He went on to sound the horn on the recent history of debate on climate change, with the familiar skeptic chorus of the previous debate on global cooling and the more recent news which so obviously served as a hook on which to hang his column, the recent recovery of Arctic ice. Because of the controversy this column caused, he wrote a follow-up piece published February 27.

Liberal bloggers went berserk. Bloggers I have read (and considered reliable) for years--Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman and many more went on multi-post tirades, blasting Will for having 'invented' the global cooling consensus of the 70s and lying about the Arctic ice recovery. They seized on this as evidence of the moribund condition of the Washington Post and demanded a retraction or, amusingly enough, a factual correction of an opinion piece.

I hold no brief for George Will. He plays the game the same way he's getting played now, and has a bigger stage to play from. But he's right on both of these counts. Will quoted numerous articles in the national press from the 70s on global cooling, and it took me 15 minutes on Scirrus.com to find two dozen scientific, peer-reviewed articles between 1970 and 1975 that mentioned global cooling in the abstract. Download Scirrus search for global cooling . Will didn't call it a consensus, and he was correct about the level of coverage.

More important is the issue of Arctic ice. Will wrote "As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." Liberal bloggers jumped all over this, saying that ice was lower by a mass the size of California. But at about the time Will's piece was published, the NSIDC had a sensor give out and gave out wrong data on ice levels for a few days. Global warming skeptics had a bit of a field day on this, with some blog commenters (not the bloggers themselves) muttering about conspiracy.

Yesterday, Walt Meier of the NSIDC wrote an open letter to Watts Up With That (a rationally skeptical weblog--one of the good ones), explaining what had happened, why and what they were doing to avoid future incidents of this type. It was an extraordinarily gracious communication, full of good will and the presumption of good will on the part of his readers.

But Meier continued the dialogue in the comments thread of the post, and was drawn into commentary on Will's opinion piece. He cited three mistakes he felt George Will had made (the other two are substantive and well worth a look, but my post here is exactly about the froth on weblogs that deliberately obscures the substance--I strongly advise you to go to Watts Up With That and read his letter and later comments). The first mistake was:

"1. He was factually incorrect on the date that he reported his “daily
global ice” number. However, he was merely out-of-date with his facts (it was true on Jan 1, but wasn’t 6 weeks later). This is somewhat nit-picky, though it illuminates how fast things can change in a relatively short period of time, meaning that one should be very
cautious about drawing any conclusions about climate from an isolated event." (Don't forget to go look at his other two mistakes.)

My clients pay me money to tell them what's going to happen in the environment in the medium term future, the 5 years out that George Will laughs at. It's a pity that I won't be able to rely on Brad DeLong and Mark Kleiman as anything more than weathervanes on environmental topics. It's more of a pity that I will have to treat everything they say going forward in much in the same way they treat the Washington Post.

And because of all this froth, we put off to yet another distant day the serious discussion about global climate change, green technology and Obama's energy plan that we so sorely need to have. Much in the style of Karl Rove, the news cycle got hijacked in the service of jihad. We are all poorer as a result.

But at least I got to use religion as a category tag for this, because that's what this is all about.

Update: Mark Kleiman very classily commented on my post, in a very non-frothy and measured way. Thanks, Mark. His point, that Will is entitled to err, but should correct mistakes when they are pointed out, is quite reasonable, and one that Will has had countless opportunities to ignore in the past.

Kleiman is also correct substantially on the measures he cites--scientific work in the 70s did use a geologic timescale when referring to the next Ice Age, and models did and do predict Arctic ice melting rapidly while Antarctic ice modelling is uncertain.

I'm happy to see and to say that Mark Kleiman is still the gracious writer that I have always seen on the Reality Based Community. Which is not to say that I agree with him 100% on the substance of this. I think we're training a microscope on Will's columns when we should be using a telescope to look at other things. I hope I'm wrong about Brad DeLong as well.

 

Green Technology--part 1 of about a hundred and thirty two posts, I imagine

One symptom of the complicated nature of green technology can be seen in the fact that I assign four categories to this post--economic, environment, politics, and, only lastly technology.

Green technologies can be separated into the following categories:

Generative: Nuclear, biomass, biofuels, solar, wind, tide, and maybe more

Recuperative: Recycling, re-using, retrofitting for insulation, etc.

Distributive: Smart power grids, micro-generation, land-use policy, etc.

The stated goal of green technology is to displace fossil fuels. The politics is fraught. The economics is dubious. The technology needs work. And the environment is waiting.

Just some brief notes from the generative side of things:

This year, the US passed Germany and became the largest producer of wind power. Are people celebrating? Do people even know? Germany, meanwhile, is the largest subsidizer of solar power--in a land that is not famous for being sun-drenched. Do people know or care?

In 2005, the US used about 21% of all energy consumed, about 100 quadrillion BTUs. In 2007, about 7% of US energy production was renewable (mostly nuclear and hydroelectric). President Obama wants to double that in the next three years. This would involve either doubling the number of nuclear power plants, tripling the number of dams, increasing 100 fold the number of windmills and solar panels, or some combination thereof. It's a challenge.

The challenge got bigger when oil prices collapsed (and those who think they will bounce right back should be talking to Brazil's Petrobras about their production plans). And, as nuclear power plants and dams are both contentious and long-term in the planning, we are left contemplating the wind, the sun, biomass and, presumably, our navels.

It seems to me that it would take about the same effort as did gearing up military production for World War II. (This may not be a coincidence--many are writing about how WWII 'cured' the Great Depression).

Windmills cost several million dollars ($4.2 million in 2001, although prices may have declined. They may also have increased, as they are incorporating more technology.) Solar panels are cheaper. America has lots of sun. But any way you slice it, renewable energy doesn't double for $50 billion, the price I heard Obama give. Perhaps he wasn't including nuclear and hydroelectric in his initial calculations? I'll check for the next post.

More later.

Update: Well, the President didn't answer my questions in his speech, but here are the bullet points from the Obama-Biden Comprehensive New Energy Plan for America, published in August of 2008:

Provide short‐term relief to American families facing pain at the pump • Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. • Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined • Put 1 million Plug‐In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America  • Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025 • Implement an economy‐wide cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050

I need to do some more digging, apparently.

Keep it clear, keep it clean

One plank of President Obama's economic recovery plan involves investing in cleaner energy infrastructure and resources. It is good, common sense conservation that we should applaud vigorously. However, it is accompanied by serious discussion of targeting technologies and channeling investment into some things that are greener than they are good. This could be dangerous in a lot of ways--as our recent experience with ethanol subsidies shows, governments can mess things up when they decide to support a technology for political reasons.

And it's not just governments. General Electric, a hard-headed, intelligent organisation that has made profits in almost every way possible, made the decision a few years back to target the green market. If you look at their stock price over the time period since they made that decision, you have to wonder what prompted their decision. To be fair, the recession hammered their stock price along with everybody else's, and the green market may require patience--GE may yet be rewarded for this decision. As a stockholder, I certainly hope so. But I hope they won't be rewarded by misallocated government spending that is targeted by wrong assumptions. In the long run, that will benefit no-one.

We don't yet know what the best way to produce electricity will be in five years' time. It may be nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas, tidal... most likely some combination, which will require serious thought and good planning. We don't yet know the best way to power personal transportation five years out.

We do know how to insulate houses and reduce energy consumption in large buildings.

We do know how to stimulate and finance effective research into best practice regarding energy.

We do know how to reduce energy consumption.

We should start there and wait for science (and yes, market decisions) to lead government investment decisions down the road.

Fade to black

It seems to me that the green machine will fade over the next five years. I don't want (on this weblog, at least) to get overly involved in the debate over global warming--there are plenty of forums discussing that, such as Real Climate and Gristmill taking the pro position, and Climate Audit and Watts Up With That taking the con.

As has been noted in other contexts, it matters more who's left than who's right. There's no money left, there will be a diminishing of political will, there will be a grand turning to other things. The green agenda will have to sink or swim on the short term viability and easily seen payback of individual projects.

It won't help that there is likely to be a volcanic eruption, probably in the Pacific Rim, that will put enough sulphates into the air to cool things off--nor that other cycles that affect the climate are turning down the thermostat, at least temporarily. These things, which operate independently from any anthropogenic contributions to greenhouse gases, will take the heat off of any urgency to deal with climate change, and there will be other pressing demands on the public purse.

A major recession is not the time to try and convince developing economies to go green. The recent fall in the market price of carbon emission permits in Europe is another sign. President Obama's failure to talk much about the energy proposals in his stimulus bill is a bit telling.

Five year prediction: Whatever happened to Al Gore and climate change?