[Vision2020] Breakthrough: The Death Of Environmentalism To The Politics Of Possibility

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.thebreakthrough.org/breakthroughbook.shtml

In the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy
with their essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it they argued
that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with
global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept
up. Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new
can be born. Now, three years later, Break Through delivers on the
authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new century, one
focused on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits.

If environmentalists and progressives are to seize the moment offered
by the collapse of the Bush presidency, they must break from "the
politics of limits," and grapple with some inconvenient truths of
their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms have failed.
The nations that ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their
greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest
deforestation has accelerated.

What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human
power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution
control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear
down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention
of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the
birth of the European Union - those breakthroughs were only made
possible by big and bold investments in the future.

The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go
beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to
create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common
good.

Break Through offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more
than casual consideration. With its challenge to conventional
environmentalist, conservative, and progressive thought, and its
proposal for a politics of possibility, Break Through will influence
the political debate for years to come.
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http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml

7. The Cold War, Computers, and the Internet

A model for the creation of the new energy economy

Just as national security concerns drove the U.S. government to invest
in computer and the Internet during the cold war, national security
concerns today should motivate large-scale investments into clean
energy.In early 2007, there was a spate of breathless media reports
announcing that clean energy would be to the early twenty-first
century what computers and the Internet were to the late twentieth.
The coverage described venture capitalist investments in everything
from biofuels made from bioengineered algae to nanotech-based solar
cells to next-generation ethanol as evidence that the transition to a
clean-energy economy was already under way.

What was largely missing from the hoopla was the recognition that none
of the private sector investments in high-tech, computers, and the
Internet would ever have occurred had the U.S. government not invested
billions of the public's money in research and development and
infrastructure in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

Companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Intel would not exist had
the Defense Department not guaranteed the market for microchips and
invented the predecessor to the Internet (Arpanet) in the 1960s and
70s.The Internet (originally Arpanet) was created by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was set up in response to the
Soviet Union's launching of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. In
the 1970s, the Defense Department effectively guaranteed the market
for microchips. And the field of computer science would today be a
marginal discipline had the federal government not spent billions on
academic scholarships, fellowships, and other training programs, to
lure the best and brightest young minds into the field. It wasn't just
computers. The invention of today's giant wind turbines was stimulated
by incentives in the United States and Denmark in the seventies and
eighties. And the first solar photovoltaic cells were created for the
U.S. space program in the 1950s.

Big, long-term investments in new technologies are made only by
governments and are almost always motivated largely by concerns about
national security or economic competitiveness, from the threat of the
Soviet Union in the 1950s to OPEC in the 1970s. Governments make the
long-term investments in R&D and infrastructure, and the private
sector capitalizes on them to develop specific products.

The problem is that similarly big, long-term investments are not being
made in clean energy. The Stern Review notes that the roughly $33
billion invested each year on supporting clean-energy technological
deployment (that amount includes nuclear) is "dwarfed by the existing
subsidies for fossil fuels worldwide that are estimated at $150
billion to $250 billion each year." It is for this reason that today,
non-hydropower sources of clean energy-biomass, wind, geothermal, and
solar-still represent only 2 percent of the world's electricity.

In announcing the Apollo space project, Kennedy said, "We choose to go
to the moon in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is
hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of
our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are
willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we
intend to win." While pushing for R&D investments in clean — energy
technology might seem an obvious job for the environmental lobby in
Washington, the truth is that pollution — oriented environmental
groups have never prioritized those investments. As a result, public
investment in energy research and development in the United States
dropped from an already modest $8 billion in 1980 to $3 billion in
2005 (in 2002 dollars). Less than a half billion is for clean energy.
In energy, as in computers and biotechnology, private investment
capital follows public investment. Private venture capital during the
same period dropped from $4 billion in 1980 to a paltry $1 billion in
2005. By way of comparison, a single biotechnology firm, Amgen,
invested more than $2.3 billion in R&D in 2005.

What's needed is a portfolio of strategic, long-term investments.
Government procurement of new technologies should be dramatically
increased, public-private partnerships pursued, training programs
created, prizes offered for technological breakthroughs, and
international research collaboration encouraged. It's not just
research and development that needs funding, but also the creation of
pilot projects, and the deployment of new technologies, ramping them
up over time. With computer science and, more recently, biotechnology
as the models, these public investments offer the promise of creating
a vibrant new industry capable of driving economic growth for decades
to come.

Read more in Chapter Five, "The Death of Environmentalism" in Break Through.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett