We’re remaking the very face of the world thanks to population and economic growth. Environmentalism is being …
Breakthrough Institute
EcocentricEnergy
Energy: Research Vs. Deployment
It’s become fashionable among energy and climate thinkers to call for greatly boosted government investment in energy research, to face up to what Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called America’s “Sputnik moment.” Certainly that was the overriding message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington that I …
EcocentricEnergy
Energy: The Future Will Be a Gas
That was one message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 summit at the National Press Club in Washington, put on by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. And it came from a high-level source: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter. Richter—who helped put together a group of 34 …
EcocentricPolitics
Politics: Will Bipartisanship Ever Be Possible on Climate and Energy?
I spent the first couple of days this week at the Governors Global Climate Summit at the University of California in Davis, where outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presided over his third gathering of regional and local leaders interested in action on global warming. (Full disclosure: I moderated two panels at the summit.) I …
EcocentricUncategorized
Climate: Why Bipartisanship on Energy Won’t Be Easy—and Why It’s Necessary
Last week I wrote about a paper on energy and climate policy that came from scholars at the leftish Brookings Institution, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the (centrist and technology-focused) Breakthrough Institute. Called “Post-Partisan Power” (download a PDF here), the paper laid out a research and development …
EcocentricEnergy
Energy: An Attempt to Breakthrough the Bipartisan Climate Policy Logjam
Update (8/14/10): A few additional voices in this argument. Over at his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Levi argues that government investment in research isn’t enough on its own to bring clean energy to parity with fossil-fuel power, in part because unlike previous innovations like the Internet, clean energy doesn’t …
EcocentricUncategorized
Energy: Will Efficiency Lead to More Consumption?
In the polarized realm of climate and energy politics, energy efficiency has always been the common ground. The concept is so attractive—we clearly waste far too much of our energy, whether that means driving a car with that gets low gas-mileage or living in a poorly insulated house. If you’re worried about climate change and are …