AS a follow up to Gore's speech I am sending out two more pieces -- this is the last of my long e-mails for a while -- it is time for me to become an essayist again!
The first piece is a speech by Professort Lester of MIT:
The second is a piece by an artist -- the producer of the "Full Monty".
All the added emphasis is mine
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http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4323
This is a transcript of a speech by Richard K. Lester, MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Industrial Performance Center, who spoke on 14 JUL 2008 at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association. Lester is a co-author of recent MIT reports on the future of nuclear energy and coal energy, and he has published widely on the management and control of nuclear technology. He is currently leading the Energy Innovation Pathways Project, an interdisciplinary MIT assessment of the capabilities of the U.S. energy innovation system.
I found the speech interesting, so I thought I would bring it to you. A quote that particularly caught my eye is the following: "And so, to conclude, it is long past time for serious federal leadership on energy innovation. But it is also time to move beyond the Manhattan/Apollo Project metaphor. A better metaphor might be a domestic Marshall Plan for energy innovation. The original Manhattan project involved a relatively small number of people working in secret. The original Marshall Plan took everyone, working together, to rebuild the broken European economy."
Energy Innovation: What’s Here and What’s Coming
Prof. Richard K. Lester Massachusetts Institute of Technology
remarks prepared for presentation to the National Governors Association Centennial Meeting Philadelphia, PA July 14, 2008
Governor Pawlenty, Governor Rendell, thank you for the privilege of speaking at this historic meeting.
I would like to discuss the role of technological innovation in solving our energy problem, and, especially, the important question of what role for policy – state as well as federal – in accelerating the innovation process.
I want to begin with three simple messages.
Recent progress in the clean technology field has been substantial. New kinds of generating capacity are being added --in some cases, notably wind, at an impressive rate. Costs are coming down, albeit sometimes more slowly than was promised.
Investment in next-generation technologies is increasing. The strong interest of the venture capital community is particularly welcome.
Ambitious targets are being set. Some of the most effective policy interventions are occurring at the state and local levels. California has been a leader. In my own state of Massachusetts, important clean
energy legislation was enacted just this month. Other states are on a similar path.
That said --and here is my first message – these activities aren’t remotely close to the scale of effort that will be required to solve the problem.
My second message concerns the future of nuclear power and of coal-fired electricity with carbon capture and storage.
These two options won’t win any popularity contests, and some would fiercely dispute that
they belong in the clean technology category at all. But without large-scale deployment of both, especially in the critical 2020 to 2050 timeframe, it is unlikely --to the point of implausibility --that the world will be able to avoid serious and perhaps even disastrous ecological and economic damage from climate change.
Coal is an abundant, relatively low-cost energy resource that is widely distributed around the world, and in the US we depend on it for half of our electricity. We cannot continue to burn it as we have, but we cannot afford to turn our back on it either. We must therefore find ways to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and to store the carbon dioxide safely underground, at reasonable cost.
Nuclear power is the only carbon-free energy source that is already contributing on a large scale and that is also expandable with few inherent limits. Public opinion has been gradually shifting in its favor, but the failure to demonstrate and implement an effective final disposal strategy for high-level waste remains a tremendous barrier to public acceptance, no matter how many expert panels and commissions opine that this is a technically feasible task.
The Yucca Mountain project may or may not meet the regulatory criteria that will eventually be applied to it. But there is no doubt that we can do better, and doing better should be a high priority.
No serious person would dispute the importance of these two innovation goals: affordable carbon capture and storage, and safe, implementable high-level nuclear waste disposal. But my basic message here is that in both cases current U.S. policies are putting our nation at least partly on the wrong track, and that this is almost certain to cause further delays in the availability of viable coal and nuclear power --delays that we can ill afford.
My third message is perhaps best conveyed by the poet Wallace Stevens, born not far from
here in Reading, PA. Stevens wrote of ‘the lunatics of one idea . . . . in a world of ideas’. He was referring to ideologues and fanatics, who, blinded by their single idea, couldn’t see the world around them. But he might as well have been talking about the energy debate, where such lunacy has unfortunately been all too common.
The fact is that there is no single idea, no silver bullet, that will solve the problem. First and foremost, we need new ways to use energy more efficiently. But very likely also much bigger contributions from solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, and also advanced fossil fuel technologies. In our current circumstances, we can ill afford the self-indulgence of those who --however well-intentioned – like to tell the world that they are anti-this, or anti-that.
***
So far I’ve been talking about our energy problem. But this is incorrect. Because we really have three separate problems, each on its own very difficult to solve. And because the solutions to one will sometimes make the others worse, the overall difficulty is more than additive – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The first problem is the projected increase in the use of energy. Unless the world goes into a deep and prolonged recession, by the middle of this century global energy use will likely have doubled, and electricity use will have tripled, placing great pressure on energy supplies and prices.
And in case there is any doubt: whatever role speculators may be playing in the current oil price spike, the underlying issue here is growing demand.
This is an era in which hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions, are lifting themselves out of poverty into what we in this country might recognize as at least a way-station on the road to a middle-class standard of living, all within the span of a few decades. This is an economic accomplishment that has no precedent in all of human history, and we should celebrate it.
One of the consequences is sharply increased energy use. But in case anyone thinks that a tripling of electricity demand by mid-century implies irresponsible, profligate consumption, I point out that this
would mean, roughly speaking, that the richest billion of the world’s population at that time would be using electricity at about the same rate that the average American uses it today, the middle 7 billion would be using it at a rate that the average Chinese is likely to reach in just a few years (or a bit more than a third of the average American’s usage today), and the poorest billion would still have no electricity at all. That is what a tripling of electricity demand by mid-century will mean.
The second problem is that for at least the next several decades the world will remain heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf for its premium fuels.
More oil and gas will certainly be found and produced in other parts of the world – though perhaps not at a rate sufficient to offset the decline in existing fields. In any case these new supplies will generally be more costly, and because of the twist of geological fate which led much of the world’s low-cost oil and gas resources to be deposited in the Gulf region, that volatile area will continue to dominate the global supply picture for the foreseeable future.
The third problem is of course that of climate change. This may or may not be the most serious problem of all, but it is certainly the most complex when we consider the scientific, technological, economic and political aspects together – as of course we must.
Much has now been learned about this problem, but many major uncertainties remain. So when the question is asked: how fast should we move to try to slow climate change? – the answer isn’t obvious.
Figuring it out will mean finding a strategy that strikes a balance between the increased economic cost of actions to reduce emissions, on the one hand, and the benefits of those actions (in terms of ecological and economic damage averted in the future), on the other. Unfortunately almost every element in that equation is uncertain. What is certain, though, is that the longer we wait to take action, the more costly the consequences will be. The clock is ticking, and it won’t stop ticking simply because we can’t or won’t decide what to do.
The best chance we have – perhaps the only chance --of solving these problems, of breaking out of this
triple straitjacket of price, climate, and security pressures, is to accelerate the introduction of new technologies for energy supply and use and deploy them on a very large scale.
Accelerate relative to what? Relative to what would happen if we left innovation entirely to the forces of the marketplace. This may be an obvious point, but it is still worth emphasizing.
Energy innovation is different from other kinds of innovation for a very important reason. The major impetus for it comes from outside the marketplace. Two of our three big problems – energy security and climate change – are not now factored into the great majority of the millions of decisions made in the marketplace every day by suppliers and consumers of energy.
So, even if innovation can help solve those problems – and there is no doubt that it can --the economic
incentives created by the play of market forces alone won’t be enough to bring it about. The question is not whether to augment these forces, but how.
Some are calling for a crash program by the federal government -a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Project for energy innovation.
These calls helpfully communicate the urgency and the scale of the challenge. But in another sense they are a distraction because, if we take them literally, we will end up solving the wrong problem.
In both the Apollo and Manhattan Projects there was a single, clearly-defined (though high-risk) technical goal. There was also just one customer – the federal government. Success meant achieving a single implementation of the new technology. In both cases this took just a few years to achieve. And cost was essentially no object.
Not one of these things applies to the case of energy. Here we have multiple and sometimes conflicting goals (lower prices, reduced carbon emissions, increased security). We have many different kinds of customers – from individual tenants and homeowners to giant industrial energy users. We have multiple time-scales, from a few years to many decades. Success will come not from a single implementation but only if the technology is adopted by many firms, or by many more individuals. And finally, energy is a commodity, so cost is crucial.
In this last sense, the upcoming energy revolution is not only not like the Manhattan project, it isn’t even like the digital revolution, to which it is sometimes also compared. It is actually much harder. Because energy innovations, unlike many digital technologies, usually must compete against an incumbent technology in an existing market, and this imposes tough, nonnegotiable requirements on cost competitiveness, on quality, and on reliability from the very beginning.
So, if we don’t need a Manhattan Project for energy innovation, what do we need?
One thing we surely need is a strategy for energy prices. Many experts argue that the greatest spur to innovation would be to make sure that the full costs of energy provision and use are incorporated in
the market price paid by consumers, including the cost of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions or their consequences, and the full cost of ensuring uninterrupted flows of oil from the Middle East.
Some argue, in fact, that if only we could get the price right, the market will do the rest --that a properly adjusted energy price will call forth the necessary innovations by making new technologies more attractive in the marketplace.
Price is very important, but it won’t be sufficient on its own.
Partly this is because we aren’t likely to ‘get the price right’ in that sense. For example, while the U.S. will probably have a carbon price at some point, perhaps even quite soon, this is sure to have escape ramps, exemptions for critical sectors, and other loopholes that will make it fall well short of what the economic models prescribe --that is, a uniform price across the economy which ramps up at the economically optimal rate. Even more elusive, of course, will be the ideal of a carbon price that is harmonized across the globe.
But equally important, a pricing approach won’t be sufficient because it won’t address the rest of the
energy innovation system --by which I mean the entire complex of direct support, indirect incentives, regulations, public and private research and educational institutions, codes, standards, and markets within which new technologies are developed and taken up by energy suppliers and users.
In the coming decades this system will be called upon to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of mostly private investment in innovative technologies, make hundreds of sites available for the construction of controversial new energy facilities, and every year train tens of thousands of young people with a strong background in energy systems engineering.
The evidence of the last three decades tells us that the current innovation system has fallen short. Yet the demands on it going forward will be much greater than anything we have yet seen. This system is in need of a major overhaul.
This effort must address the entire innovation process, including obstacles to commercial demonstration, to early adoption, and to large-scale deployment. This is not just about research
and development.
There is no doubt that funding on a much larger scale will be needed for both fundamental research and technology development. Both government and private investment in energy R&D are far below where they should be.
But the whole point is to achieve scale in technology applications. And without attention to critical bottlenecks downstream of the R&D stage --including commercial technology demonstrations, which have often been poorly handled by the federal government --many of the potential benefits of more R&D funding won’t be realized.
In short, we must be as creative and rigorous in our thinking about how to redesign the institutions for
innovation as we will need to be about the innovations themselves.
For example, we must find a way to overcome the obstacles to sound innovation strategies created by the annual government budgeting and appropriations process, by federal procurement regulations, and by shifting political winds.
Here is one idea: Suppose we adopted the principle that the public good part of the energy innovation system beyond basic research (which the Department of Energy manages quite well) should be directly funded by industry sales, rather than by general tax revenues.
Suppose that these funds were collected in the form of a small fee applied to all end-user sales in a given
industry segment – electricity service, for example, or gas service --ifthe majority of the firms in that segment voted to do so (Congress would probably have to approve this.) A fee of less than three tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour – or about 60 cents per week for the average household – would generate an
annual stream of revenue five times larger than the total annual DOE budget for applied energy research, development and demonstration.
Suppose, then, that the firms in this industry organized themselves into interest groups, or innovation boards, which would each be responsible for a different technological pathway – smart grid technologies, carbon capture and storage, next generation photovoltaics, and so on.
Each board would request proposals to fund work in its domain from businesses, public research laboratories, universities, and others. To qualify to receive these funds, bidders would have to agree to
put the resulting intellectual property into the public domain – available to everyone.At the beginning of each cycle, every firm in the industry would distribute the fees collected from its customers among these boards based on their work programs and its own priorities. If, say, a utility was particularly eager to see progress in carbon capture and sequestration, it might allocate funds to the carbon capture and sequestration board. Or, if it was concerned about skilled manpower shortages, it would allocate funds to the energy education and training board, which might have an ongoing scholarship program for power engineering students.
If a utility was unhappy with the progress being made by one board, it could redirect its funding to another. Or it could itself decide to form a board in a new area and fund that, perhaps in
conjunction with other firms. It would in any case have to commit all of its innovation fees to one board or another.
Such a scheme would create a guaranteed stream of revenues for energy innovation, while avoiding both the Federal appropriations process and the problem of underinvestment by private free riders. It would ensure that decisions on what to do and who should be funded to do it would be made by those closest to the energy marketplace. And by requiring IP to be shared, it would avoid unfair competitive advantage.***
Another idea: There is great potential for small, entrepreneurial firms to contribute to innovation in the energy sector, as they do in other industries.
But the energy industries are dominated by large incumbent providers who are often slow to embrace transformative or disruptive innovations. These firms typically have tightly integrated supply chains and close ties to government regulators, and they rely on highly-regulated pipelines or wires to deliver
energy services to end users. This creates a formidable barrier between entrepreneurial newcomers and end users, and tends to force innovation towards the upstream end of the value chain.
But many opportunities for innovation lie right at the interface with the end-user. Most consumers are
indifferent to energy itself – that is, to BTUs or kilowatt hours. What they care about are the services that energy enables: affordable comfort, mobility, lighting, and so on. The provision of energy is almost always just one part of a larger set-up in which a value-added service is delivered to the consumer.
Finding opportunities to combine energy services in creative new ways with other services and products is exactly where smaller entrepreneurial firms can be expected to shine. We need to find ways to let these firms compete and grow in this important innovation space.
***What role for the states in all this?
Decisive progress on the major energy issues will require decisive action at the federal level. It cannot be achieved by states alone. And the longer the delay in serious leadership at the federal level, the
more difficult it will be to harmonize conflicting policies.
But many of the relevant authorities – to regulate utilities, to make land-use decisions, to set building codes and zoning requirements, to support public education, and so on – reside at the state and local levels. So the task will require a partnership of federal, state, and local governments.
There is more than enough to do here for everyone. Whole new industries are likely to develop in support of the energy transition, and state-level policies promoting innovation take-up and the development of a skilled workforce will be vital.
Jobs will be generated at every skill level – not just the top end of the range --and since many of these jobs must be located close to the point of energy use, they are at less risk of outsourcing to lower-wage economies.
Just as one example, let’s suppose that by the year 2030 the U.S. was generating 5% of its electricity from small-scale photovoltaic installations – an ambitious goal, though not as ambitious as some recent targets. A rough estimate is that this would create twenty years of steady local work for 45,000-50,000 installers – mostly electricians and construction workers – and perhaps double that number if we include indirect labor. About two hundred thousand additional jobs would be created upstream in the PV value chain – some of which would also be located here in the U.S. And of course this doesn’t include the other 95% of the power sector, where many more new jobs are also likely to be created.***
And so, to conclude, it is long past time for serious federal leadership on energy innovation. But it is also time to move beyond the Manhattan/Apollo Project metaphor. A better metaphor might be a domestic Marshall Plan for energy innovation. The original Manhattan project involved a relatively small number of people working in secret. The original Marshall Plan took everyone, working together, to rebuild the broken European economy.
Let us recapture that inspired exercise of American leadership at home. As we did once before on
foreign soil, let us combine a vision of what can be with a command of hard facts and data to build an effective system for energy innovation in every one of our United States.Thank you again for the honor of being with you this morning.
Richard K. Lester
***
The original link to this transcript can be found here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/energy-lester-0714.html
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Even oilmen believe our planet is burning up, says Full Monty writer behind terrifying TV drama
By Simon Beaufoy
Last updated at 10:12 PM on 19th July 2008
I am sitting in the office of a man who was, until recently, chief executive of one of the biggest oil companies in the world: a man who made his company billions of dollars. I listen, make the odd nervous note and reflect that it's been a long road since I wrote one of Britain's best-loved films, The Full Monty.
As a scriptwriter, I have met lots of powerful people, but my reaction is always the same. When I went to the Oscars, I sat next to a pleasant, elegant woman and chatted happily to her until somebody pointed out it was Claudia Schiffer. After that, I could not utter another word.
But today it isn't because I am star-struck that I am terrified; it is because the oil man is telling me the opposite of everything he should say. Over the tinkle of teacups, he is predicting the end of civilisation.
Rupert Penry-Jones and Neve Campbell in Simon Beaufoy's new two-part drama, Burn Up
My friends give me uncomfortable looks about my new film, Burn Up, because I have a Cassandra-like reputation for writing fiction about things that later become fact.
Many years ago, I made a film called The Darkest Light about a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. Two years later, it happened for real.
I wrote the script for another film called Yasmin that suggested disaffected British Muslim youths could turn to terrorism. A year later came the London suicide bombings.
I'm not boasting: I just listen to experts who prove frighteningly accurate.
Burn Up - starring Rupert Penry-Jones, who played Adam Carter in the hit BBC series Spooks - is about the moment runaway climate change collides with an unprecedented oil crisis.
So given my track record, my friends are keen to know what happens at the end.
Once I had decided to write a drama about climate change I spoke to everybody who was prepared to talk.
Surprisingly, this turned out not just to be the usual environmental suspects such as Greenpeace, Friends Of The Earth or WWF, but people in the oil industry.
And these weren't disaffected whistle-blowers, but some senior figures who were prepared to step out of the shadows and tell me just how scared they were.
The oil man predicting an apocalypse was one of them. I had gone to his office expecting him to tell me global warming was at best an uncertain science based on dodgy data, at worst a Left-wing conspiracy designed to tax us all to death.
'Fiddling while Rome burns': Even oil industry chiefs now privately admit global warming will worsen disastrously without urgent action
Oil companies pumped out the oil that was producing the carbon dioxide, so why would he tell me any different?
Sure enough, that's how the interview started. The world was 'going through a 40-year transition period from a carbon economy to a hydrogen economy' where oil would smoothly be replaced by other sources of renewable energy.
He talked on convincingly. The tea-lady brought round the trolley. I felt reassurance waft over me: the environmental scaremongers were wrong.
Then I looked up. A '40-year transition period'? I cleared my throat, and nervously suggested that Sir John Houghton, the scientist who led the first Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, had told me we had at best ten years to stop the increase in global temperatures, otherwise we were in danger of runaway climate change. Ten years tops. Not 40.
The CEO stopped in his tracks. 'Oh, you've talked to him, have you?' His tone changed.
He sat down heavily and said: 'Well, I know John and he's right, and if you want to know what I really think, I think we're fiddling while Rome burns.' He was the first of many to come to the confessional. People who for the sake of their careers shouldn't even have returned my phone calls were opening their hearts to me. Why such dangerous honesty towards a writer?
I found the answer at a conference of the Tipping Point organisation which puts artists and scientists together to learn about climate change.
We met at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre, in which were placed signs reading 'politics', 'business', 'the media' and 'science'. We were asked to stand under the sign we thought offered the most hope of progress on the issue.
With some giggling and shoving, 200 people crowded underneath the various signs. When this musical chairs for adults finally stopped, there were just two people under the 'science' sign. Only one of them was a scientist.
We were aghast. The room was full of eminent scientists from across the world, yet none of them had the confidence to stand under their own sign.
Why? ' Because nobody is listening, ' they answered. 'For 15 years we've been warning about rising sea levels, melting icecaps, changes in sea currents, weakening monsoons, the acidification of the ocean. Yet nobody is listening to us.'
It is extraordinary. There are thousands of scientific studies by climatologists, oceanologists, biologists - every ologist imaginable - charting the current and future effects of climate change. Yet half the population of this country still doesn't believe it.
Today, there's a lot of talk about renewable energy and the G8's latest pledge of cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050. But we've got ten years to turn this around, not 40.
Sir James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory on the ecological balance of the planet, told me it was like the days of appeasement before the Second World War when Hitler was rearming, polishing the boots of his stormtroopers and annexing countries while much of the British Establishment chose to look the other way.
I was so frightened by what I heard that I put solar panels and a wind generator on my roof, changed to a green electricity tariff, cycled everywhere.
Did it make one jot of difference? No. But if I couldn't change my behaviour knowing what I now knew, how could I expect a government to change?
As I dug around the oil industry, I came across another extraordinary elephant in the room that nobody dared mention, but which will become crucial in the fight to prevent irreversible warming: Peak Oil.
This is what they call the moment when we start running out of the stuff.
When I started on this journey, three years ago, oil was 50 dollars a barrel and the Peak Oil theorists were dismissed as alarmist fringe elements. We were apparently at least 50 years away from Peak Oil. Anyone who dared to say different was simply laughed at.
But then I met a man employed by the oil industry to collate data on oil reserves, and he told me that already we are not producing enough oil to meet demand, and even if output were increased, it would be used up by growing demand from China and India.
So, I asked, what did this mean?
'A global crash,' he said, 'at a guess somewhere between 2008 and 2010.'
I left his office on a beautiful, globally-warmed day with house prices soaring and the financial markets blossoming. Clearly, the man was nuts.
But who is nuts, now? Oil has hit 147 dollars a barrel, house prices are plummeting and the stock markets are going through the floor. And yet, still, is anyone listening?
Somehow, I had to turn a mass of complex science and politics into something people would want to watch, but how could I dramatise carbon dioxide, an enemy you can't see, smell or touch?
It would be like Spooks without the terrorists, The Wire without the drug dealers.
I found the answer in men like John Ashton, Tony Blair's 'climate tsar'. A former diplomat, he now shuttles between China and Europe, patiently negotiating, encouraging, persuading the Chinese, soon to become the world's biggest emitters of CO2, to sign up to emission reduction targets.
You are unlikely to see his name anywhere, for that is certainly not his style, but if we ever get ourselves out of this mess, it is people such as John who will have saved us.
And that's what gave me the key to Burn Up: the lies and duplicity of the denial industry pitched against people desperate to prevent runaway climate change.
I concealed a mass of factual science and politics inside the Trojan Horse of a racy thriller.
And where does this leave me? What does Cassandra have to say about the chances of humanity solving this most dangerous of puzzles?
You might be surprised to know that I believe there is still hope.
As Rupert Penry-Jones's character says in the film: 'Oil. Oil is everything.' Its all-consuming use has caused the problem and now its scarcity might just save us.
A spiralling price that triggers a global power-down could buy us the time to stop the warming. In fact, it's happening right now.
Will it work? We're about to find out.
• Burn Up begins on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday and concludes at the same time on Friday.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1036513/Even-oilmen-believe-planet-burning-says-Full-Monty-writer-terrifying-TV-drama.html
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