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Do we need technology breakthroughs to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 parts per million and avert climate catastrophe?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not think so, as I explained here (although they certainly want to spend more money on R&D, as does everyone on the planet who cares about global warming except maybe Senator John McCain). I agree with the IPCC, as do most energy analysts I know.
People who don’t see global warming as an urgent matter, like President Bush, his Sience Advisor, his former Energy Secretary, Gingrich, Lomborg, and Michael Crichton, think we can’t possibly solve the problem without with battery such as Dell D7310 Battery , Dell DF192 Battery , Dell DF230 Battery , Dell DF249 Battery , Dell F0590A01 Battery , Dell F0993 Battery , Dell F144M Battery , Dell F1450A Battery , Dell F5136 Battery , Dell F707H Battery , Dell FF232 Battery , Dell FG442 Battery breakthroughs (see “The Debate of the Decade” for most of the quotes or links) — or at least that’s what they say.
Then we have the Breakthrough Institute (B.I.), which, as its name suggests, also thinks we need breakthroughs, but seems to be quite genuinely concerned about global warming. The Breakthrough Institute was founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the famous “The Death of Environmentalism” essay and the recent book Breakthrough. Roger Pielke, Jr., among others, is a Fellow.
In this post, I’ll explain why the answer to the question posed is “no” and why that’s a good thing! The short answer is
These seem reasonable to me. Slow, incremental improvement is not a breakthrough. The windpower industry has dropped its costs steadily by a factor of 10 over the past quarter century, while slowly improving performance. These are the steady gains we expect as a technology moves along the manufacturing learning curve and achieves economies of scale. Heck many technologies like wind even have a predictable link between product cost and installed capacity (see here) — that is a key reason deployment policies are much more important than spending huge sums looking for breakthroughs. [If there has been anything anybody in the wind industry would call a technology breakthrough as defined here, I'd be interested in hearing about it.]
Now B.I. recently accused me (here) of using “an extremely narrow definition of the word ‘breakthrough’ because it’s much easier for him to refute. But if he had read Breakthrough’s policy whitepaper, “Fast, Clean, Cheap,” [JR: I have. It's not something I can recommend to anyone else.] he would know that we call for breakthroughs in performance, price, and brand-new technologies“