Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

In this week’s issue of Nature: What do radar, nuclear power, the Internet, and DNA have in common with technological innovation to decarbonize the economy?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Most of the focus these days is on how we can mitigate climate warming by achieving specific reductions targets like 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.  Economists from McGill University, Isabel Galiana and Christopher Greene, are going to stir up debate in their latest paper¹ in Nature by arguing that the current way of thinking about mitigating warming needs to be turned on its head.

Focusing on rapid emissions reductions, they say, may not be the best way to rapidly stabilize climate as cheaply as possible.  They even go as far as to say that climate can be stabilized at a 2 degree C warming even if most of the carbon reductions don’t happen until after 2050.

What’s the basis for their argument?  Technology-led approaches.  Let’s see what this means…

In the recent 2009 Copenhagen Consensus on Climate (an annual meeting of economists to discuss ways to solve the world’s pressing problems), they were part of a panel of economists that ranked 15 proposals to mitigate warming.  Their key findings included

• For $US 100 billion per year invested in global energy R&D for the rest of the century, we can stabilize emissions and minimize warming.
• A technology focus should replace the current focus on emissions reductions.
• This can happen with a low “fee” (tax) of $5/ton carbon, which would raise $150 billion annually.
• The carbon fee would be allowed to double every decade, sending a price forward signal that carbon is getting increasingly expensive and that the benefit of developing and deploying low-C technologies as soon as possible is a good idea.  By 2050, carbon would cost $40/ton.
• Isolate this revenue as much as possible from politicians, by, say, putting it in a trust fund managed by public and private sectors much in the way the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation operates.
• Open competitions for these funds by companies, nations, and individuals to accelerate new technology development.  Others not in this competition can apply to use the funds to implement the successful technology developed from them.
• This approach facilitates development of breakthrough technology, allows technology to be scaled up, encourages demonstration projects, and helps diffuse technology spread.

Conventional emissions reduction approaches, they argue, have many pitfalls:

• They risk reducing emissions before the new technologies are fully developed and available, which could impact global GDP more than it should if we worried less about emissions reductions up front and did everything we could to push out new technology.
• They risk causing C prices to rise too rapidly, which could impact politically sensitive industries employing a lot of people, such as cement, steel, aluminum, and glass.
• Policies favoring high C prices (through cap and trade or high C taxes) don’t necessarily lead to new investment, especially if the revenue generated from these systems is used for anything other than energy R&D.

So back to the question in the title: What do radar, nuclear power, the Internet, and DNA have in common with technology to help us mitigate warming? Galiana, and Green argue

• they require(d) significant public investment to develop;
• the scientific knowledge needed to develop them is (was) not easy to patent, which challenged private investment;
• potential pay-offs are (were) decades away, which dissuades corporate boards focused mainly on short-term profit and stock prices.

¹Galiana, I. and C. Green (2009) Let the Technology Race Begin. Nature 462:570-571.

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