The just-published "Break Through: From the Death
of Environmentalism to the Politics of
Possibility" has changed my mind more than
anything I've read in years. I hope you'll buy it
at your local bookstore, or order it from the
link at http://www.calcars.org/books.html

It's by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus --
you may know of them from their:
* controversial 2004 essay, "The Death of
Environmentalism," asserting that the mainstream
environmental movement was on several wrong tracks, and urging its rebirth
* part in creating the Apollo Alliance http://home.apolloalliance.org
* role in developing Sen. Obama/Rep. Inslee's "Health Care for Hybrids" bill
* research and analysis at the unusual American
Environics consulting firm http://www.americanenvironics.com
* work at The Breakthrough Institute think tank http://www.TheBreakthrough.org

The authors see today's environmentalist approach
that takes greenhouse gases as a more challenging
pollution problem that can be addressed primarily
by regulation (cap-and-trade, carbon taxes) as
inadequate to meet the challenge of global
warming. And they show that a massive public
sector commitment ($300 billion over 10 years in
the US) is not only necessary, it's equivalent to
what helped create key past technologies. This
book draws on themes invoked by such thought
leaders as architect/designer William McDonough,
journalist Thomas Friedman and venture capitalist
John Doerr about inspiring human creativity and
finding hope in human aspirations and nature's
abundance -- and points us to a strategic vision for the next decades.

When I read this book, I thought of the audacity
of President Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of
the Civil War, facing an unknown future, signing
the Pacific Railroad Act and between 1862-1864,
committing the enormous sum of $60 million to
unite a future nation. And I thought of the
visionaries I recently met in out-of-the-way
Iceland
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/861.html ,
who plan to be zero-carbon pioneers.

The authors point to our Prius conversions and
the PHEV campaign as examples of creative
strategies -- most recently in their entertaining
Oct 2 interview on KQED Forum
http://www.kqed.org/pgmArchive/RD19/20070930/week
. When they suggested I join their Advisory Board
(an admirable group
http://www.thebreakthrough.org/advisoryboard.shtml
), I felt their message was so important that I agreed to join.

Below are the authors' 2.5-page New Republic
article, which gives a good presentation of their
overall approach, plus (of interest to those who
are skeptical about the need for large public
investment), excerpts from a San Francisco
Chronicle story showing how four generations of
technological innovations in Silicon Valley --
radio, vacuum tubes transistors and chips -- all
could NOT have happened without massive federal
funds, mostly from the Defense Department.

Also see the profile in Wired
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/mf_burning
and several long postings by the authors at the
Amazon page for the book (get there from link at
http://www.calcars.org/books.html .) At their
blog
htttp://www.thebreakthrough.org/blog/index.shtml
scroll halfway down to find links to many
articles, reviews, commentaries and critiques of
the book. And at the main page
http://www.TheBreakthrough.org you can find a
list of the upcoming stops of their book tour
(Toronto, Boston, Colorado, Seattle, Portland, SF Bay Area).


WAYS THIS BOOK HELPED CHANGE MY THINKING
* I've been mystified about people who didn't
want to see "An Inconvenient Truth." Even as I
agreed with many others that this powerful and
effective movie came up short in offering
solutions, I still felt frustrated by those who
stayed away because they couldn't face the "doom
and gloom" message. By drawing on their academic
backgrounds, the authors convincingly show how
ear and anxiety can de-motivate and disempower
many people. Break Through starts off with a
contrasting story -- about Martin Luther King's
1963 Lincoln Memorial speech, which began as "I
have a nightmare" -- then moved to "I have a dream."
* Until provoked to think more deeply, I felt
those whose response to climate crisis was to
conclude that instead of solutions we need
adaptation as missing the point. Talk about
"preparedness" seemed like a capitulation -- or
an impulse to find a way to make money from
misery. Now I see that including these people,
who want to get involved rather than deny the
problem, at least puts them on a continuum of action.
* The authors say that to reduce CO2 globally,
you have to reduce global per capita CO2 -- that
makes sense. But then they take the mental leap
to say that will require working to equalize
living standards globally. That's an
inconceivably large challenge -- but thinking
about it this way could irrevocably transform our global strategies.
* I'm also grateful for a few more catchy
phrases: we've long heard "the iron age didn't
end because we ran out of iron." To that we can
now add: "We did not invent the Internet by
taxing telegraphs nor the personal computer by limiting typewriters."


LEST YOU THINK WE'RE ONE-SIDED
* The book has an entire section that's highly
abstract and philosophical … some will appreciate it, some will skip over it!
* The authors' case may at times be overstated:
national environmental organizations are evolving
their approaches and presenting positive visions.
* The phrase "Break Through" may be problematic.
The authors use it as a two-word verb: to get
beyond existing social, political and technical
limitations. More commonly, as a one-word noun,
it implies a need to find and develop entirely
new technologies and energy sources. Yet our
untapped opportunities in efficiency and
conservation say otherwise. Cost-effective
solutions are within sight -- for instance, see
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/860.html
about how Sunpower's solar photovoltaics and
Ausra's solar thermal power generation could soon
be cost-competitive with new natural gas and coal
plants. From those who talk about breakthroughs,
we hear less about the third D in RD&D --
Research, Development and Deployment. PHEVs and
today's low- and zero-carbon energy technologies
need a level playing field for incentives, volume
production and commercialization. We're inclined
to reserve the term breakthrough for developing
feasible carbon capture and sequestration or the
way-out "geoengineering" schemes that advocates
hope could help save us if we are unable to make
a rapid transition to low-carbon sustainable technologies.
* What we most appreciate about the book and the
website http://www.thebreakthrough.org is that
they are leading to an expanded dialogue and very healthy debates.


THE NEW REPUBLIC
Environmental issues September 24, 2007
Second Life
A Manifesto for a new environmentalism

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are
managing directors of American Environics. Their
book, Break Through: From the Death of
Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility,
from which this article is adapted, will be
published on October 4 by Houghton Mifflin.

Rachel Carson opened Silent Spring, her 1962
polemic against chemical pesticides, with a
terrible prophecy: "Man has lost the capacity to
foresee and to forestall. He will end by
destroying the earth." She proceeded to narrate a
"Fable for Tomorrow," describing a bucolic
American town "where all life seemed to live in
harmony with its surroundings." The nearby farms
flourished, the foxes barked, and the birds sang
in a kind of pastoral Eden. "Then a strange
blight crept over the area and everything began
to change. Some evil spell had settled on the
community." Cattle died. Children died. And the
birds stopped singing. It was a silent spring.

The moral of the story was obvious: Apocalypse
was imminent unless humankind stopped violating
nature. And so it came to pass that the
environmental movement's highest priority would
be to limit our contamination of the world around
us. This "pollution paradigm" worked well
enough-for a time. Regulatory legislation of the
1960s and '70s cleaned up our lakes and rivers
and greatly reduced smog in our cities. In the
1990s, it dealt with acid rain and phased out
ozone-depleting chemicals. Given these successes,
it's not surprising that environmental leaders
have seen global warming, which is caused by
human greenhouse gas emissions, as, essentially, a very big pollution problem.

In the summer of 2006, Carson was resurrected in
the form of Al Gore, whose documentary, An
Inconvenient Truth, began with images of power
plants belching pollution and ended with scenes
from the apocalypse: hurricanes, floods, and
droughts. In case viewers missed the point, Gore
observed, "It was almost like a nature hike
through the Book of Revelation." And he warned,
"It's human nature to take time. But there will
also be a day of reckoning." This narrative had
dominated environmental thought for so long that
few of us who grew up hearing it ever thought
much about it. Nor have many of us questioned
what appears to be the obvious solution to global
warming: limits on pollution, especially carbon emissions.

The problem is that global warming is as
different from smog in Los Angeles as nuclear war
is from gang violence. The quantitative
accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
has created something qualitatively different
from the pollution problems of old: changing
temperatures, which may lead to acute droughts,
new disease epidemics, and even wars over
resources like water. While dealing with smog and
acid rain required relatively simple and
inexpensive technical fixes-such as catalytic
converters on cars and scrubbers on power plants-
oil and coal are central to the functioning of
the economy, and their replacements remain far more expensive.

Nor should we want to dramatically curtail energy
consumption. Increasing energy use is the primary
cause of global warming, but it is also a primary
cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans,
better medical treatment, and greater personal
and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail
against consumption and counsel sacrifice all
they want, but neither poor countries like China
nor rich countries like the United States are
going to dramatically reduce their emissions if
doing so slows economic growth. Given this, the
challenge we face as a species is to roughly
double global energy production by mid-century
while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas
emissions in half worldwide (and about 80 percent
in the United States), so that we can avoid the
worst consequences of climate change.

How could such a massive undertaking be achieved?
Not, as environmental leaders insist, by limiting
human power but rather by unleashing it. In terms
of birthing a new energy economy, regulation is
important--it's just not the most important
thing. The highest objective of anyone concerned
about global warming must be to bring down the
real price of clean energy below the price of
dirty energy as quickly as possible--most
importantly, in places like China. And, for that
to happen, we'll need a new paradigm centered on
technological innovation and economic
opportunity, not on nature preservation and ecological limits.

Over the last ten years, a consensus has emerged
among energy policy experts-one no less important
than the consensus among climate scientists that
carbon emissions are warming the earth. What's
needed, they say, are disruptive clean-energy
technologies that achieve nonincremental
breakthroughs in both price and performance.
Reflecting the consensus, New York University
physicist Martin Hoffert and 16 other leading
energy experts concluded a landmark 2002 analysis
in the journal Science by observing that,
"although regulation can play a role, the fossil
fuel greenhouse effect is an energy problem that
cannot be simply regulated away."

Despite this consensus, environmental lobbyists
in Washington today are overwhelmingly focused on
addressing global warming through two overlapping
strategies. First, they want to establish a cap
on greenhouse gases that decreases over time.
Second, they want to make clean-energy sources
cost-competitive by increasing the cost of dirty
energy. While there is great debate about how to
best implement these strategies--whether through
traditional command-and-control regulatory
mechanisms, market-based cap-and-trade
approaches, or an outright tax on carbon
emissions--there is little question that the solution is pollution regulation.

It is not. The challenge is simply too large. In
2007, human beings will consume roughly 15
terawatts of energy worldwide. That level of
energy use will rise rapidly over the next 100
years due to population growth and increasing
living standards, especially among the global
poor. By the year 2100, humankind will need to
produce and consume roughly 60 terawatts of
energy if every human on earth is to reach the
level of prosperity enjoyed today by the world's
wealthiest one billion people. Even if economies
were to become much more efficient, the total
terawatts needed to bring all of humankind out of
poverty would still need to roughly double by 2050 and triple by century's end.

Consider China. Today, the country is rumbling
with rising prosperity, rising expectations,
rising demands for freedom- all fueled by cheap,
dirty coal energy. This year or next, China will
surpass the United States as the world's largest
producer of greenhouse gas emissions. And yet,
the average Chinese still consumes less than 20
percent of the energy consumed by the average
American, meaning that the Chinese contribution
to global warming is going to grow tremendously.
After all, neither the Chinese people nor the
Chinese government will accept any solution that
does not allow energy consumption comparable to our own.

The only way to double global energy consumption
while cutting global warming emissions in half is
by developing new sources of clean energy. Thus,
the problem with the proposals currently being
discussed in Congress: They will, for the
foreseeable future, direct private investment
toward the least expensive emissions reductions
(such as burning methane from landfills,
purchasing forest land for carbon sequestration,
or retrofitting power plants and buildings so
they operate more efficiently) rather than toward
breakthrough technologies (like low-cost solar
energy and carbon capture and storage), which are
too expensive to become widely adopted today but
which are vital for creating a new energy economy
and thus drastically reducing emissions.
Cap-and-trade schemes, for example, would achieve
some inexpensive reductions but wouldn't drive
investment into long-term R&D because those
investments would not immediately reduce
emissions. Nor can private firms invest in the
public infrastructure, such as new transmission
lines, both because they are public and also
because they are so capital intensive.

Even if such regulations were to provide the
right economic incentives, they provide the wrong
political ones. The regulation-centered approach
to global warming fails because it depends on
doing something highly unpopular: raising the
price of energy. Fears of political backlash will
prevent lawmakers from raising the price of
carbon (and thus the price of electricity and
gasoline) high enough for clean energy to become
cost-competitive. It is for this reason that
virtually every congressional proposal to
regulate carbon emissions gives industry an "out"
if compliance with the law becomes too expensive.
The regulation-centered approach is thus doomed
to fail in one way or another: Price carbon too
high and risk economic consequences and political
backlash; price it too low, and dirty-energy
sources will not cost enough to make clean energy cost-competitive.

The concern over higher energy prices has plagued
European efforts to comply with the Kyoto treaty
on global warming. EU nations issued too many
emissions credits. Thus, neither the regulations
themselves nor the resulting low market price for
carbon has lowered emissions or raised much money
for clean-energy technologies. Little surprise
then that, late last year, the United Nations
quietly announced that, since 2000, the emissions
of the 41 wealthy, industrialized members of
Kyoto had gone up, not down, by more than 4 percent.

While pushing for a bold clean energy agenda
might seem like an obvious job for the
environmental lobby, the truth is that
environmental groups have never prioritized those
investments because they have been focused on
limiting pollution. The absence of an effective
lobby for clean energy explains, in part, why
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. Given this, it's understandable that
energy is the least innovative sector of the
economy. Coal has been in widespread use for 150
years, and oil for 80. Our houses, cars,
medicines, manufacturing, communications, and
consumer technologies have all improved
dramatically over the last century, but our
energy sources have not. Today, clean-energy
sources, such as biomass, wind, geothermal, and
solar, represent just 2 percent of the world's electricity.

The kind of technological revolution called for
by energy experts typically does not occur via
regulatory fiat. We did not invent the Internet
by taxing telegraphs nor the personal computer by
limiting typewriters. Nor did the transition to
the petroleum economy occur because we taxed,
regulated, or ran out of whale oil. Those
revolutions happened because we invented
alternatives that were vastly superior to what
they replaced and, in remarkably short order, became a good deal cheaper.

And, contrary to conventional wisdom, private
firms rarely initiate technological revolutions.
Indeed, government has always been at the center
of technological innovation, and most of
America's largest industries have benefited from
strategic government investments in their
development. Farm land was granted to early
American frontier farmers, and agriculture has
been publicly subsidized since the early
twentieth century. Before the Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln was best known for his aggressive
advocacy of publicly funded transit
infrastructure: canals, roads, and railroads.
During the cold war, government investment was
essential to the aerospace industry's development.

Big, long-term investments in new technologies
are made only by governments and are almost
always motivated by concerns about national
security or economic competitiveness, from the
threat of the Soviet Union in the 1950s to OPEC
in the '70s. The Internet (originally Arpanet)
was created by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which was itself established in
response to the Soviet Union's launching of the
first Sputnik satellite in 1957. The invention of
today's giant wind turbines was stimulated by
incentives in the United States and Denmark in
the '70s and '80s. The first solar photovoltaic
cells were created for the space program in the
'50s. And today's highly mature energy markets
are the result of decades of subsidies for coal mining and oil drilling.

Our priority, then, should be a five- or ten-fold
increase in investment in clean energy-broadly
defined to include R&D, deployment, procurement,
education, and infrastructure-from less than $3
billion per year to $15 to $30 billion. Indeed,
what matters most about the global-warming
legislation being considered in Congress is how
much money it will raise to invest in clean
energy. Auctioning emissions permits to polluting
firms could generate $15 billion or more per
year. A tax on carbon could generate a similar
amount. A $300 billion investment over ten years
would, according to one study, generate an
additional $200 billion in private capital.

Some of this money ought to be used to create a
new military-industrial-academic complex around
clean-energy sciences, similar to the one we
created around computer science in the 1950s and
'60s. The transformation of Silicon Valley from a
sleepy collection of apple orchards and small
towns to the information technology powerhouse
that it is today was the result of massive
investments by the federal government into a set
of interlinked military, industrial, and academic
institutions in the region--a fact that is
largely ignored by many high-tech executives, who
prefer to imagine that it all started in Bill
Hewlett's garage. Concretely, this means creating
undergraduate and graduate programs in new energy
sciences; postgraduate fellowships for
scientists, engineers, and technicians; and
training for the electricians, construction
workers, efficiency experts, and installers
needed to make the clean-energy revolution real.

And some of it ought to be used to buy down the
price of clean-energy technologies like the
Defense Department did with microchips. Today,
microchips are cheap and seem to be inside of
everything: our cell phones, our watches, and our
cars. But it wasn't always this way. Microchips
used to be big, slow, and expensive. Then, in the
1960s, the Pentagon made the strategic decision
to effectively guarantee the market for
microchips, allowing firms such as Intel to grow
and eventually stand on their own. Some energy
experts have calculated that an investment of
roughly $200 billion would bring the price of
solar energy down to that of coal. Investments
could also be made in carbon capture and storage,
geothermal energy, and wind power, as well as
toward the energy infrastructure needed so that
clean-energy sources can compete on a level
playing field. The goal would not be to subsidize
clean energy in perpetuity but rather to make the
kinds of investments that ultimately bring the
real price of clean energy down to the price of
dirty-energy sources like coal in places like China.

Doing all this will require a more optimistic
narrative from the environmental community.
Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, like Silent Spring,
was considered powerful because it marshaled the
facts into an effective (read: apocalyptic)
story. But, ironically, for more than seven
years, research that environmentalists have
privately conducted on attitudes toward global
warming has found the opposite: Cautionary tales
and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke
fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among
voters-not the rational embrace of environmental
policies. This research is consistent with
extensive social-science research that strongly
correlates fear, rising insecurity, and pessimism
about the future with resistance to change.

In promoting the inconvenient truth that humans
must limit their consumption and sacrifice their
way of life to prevent the world from ending,
environmentalists are not only promoting a
solution that won't work, they've discouraged
Americans from seeing the big solutions at all.
For Americans to be future-oriented, generous,
and expansive in their thinking, they must feel secure, wealthy, and strong.

How might history have been different had
environmentalists and their political allies 20
years ago proposed that the nations of the world
make a massive, shared investment in clean
energy, better and more efficient housing
development, and more comfortable and efficient
transportation systems? The tables would have
been turned. Globalwarming skeptics would have
had to take a position against the growth of new
markets and industries. Proponents of this
investment agenda could have tarred their
opponents as being anti-business, anti-growth,
anti-investment, anti-jobs, and stuck in the past.

Thankfully, it's not too late. Today, there is
quickly emerging a new political lobby and
movement for clean-energy investment that is
unburdened by the pollution paradigm.
Increasingly, energy companies and investors are
realizing that they cannot rely on the
environmental lobby and must take political
matters into their own hands. And, with young and
grassroots environmentalists more inspired by the
vision of creating a new energy economy than
regulating the old one, there's new hope that we
will soon see the emergence of a more expansive,
relevant, and powerful ecological movement, one
grounded in possibilities, not limits.

To be sure, the effort to reduce and stabilize
global greenhouse gas emissions will require a
major regulatory effort to make sure that
everyone is playing by the same rules, provide a
stable investment environment for nations and
businesses, and increase the cost of fossil fuels
relative to cleaner energy sources. But the
conventional wisdom today about global warming is
backwards. Environmentalism is not the solution
to the crisis of global warming. Instead, global
warming is driving environmentalism to evolve
into something else. Reflecting on the birth of a
politics capable of dealing with global warming,
Bill McKibben, the author of the seminal 1989
book The End of Nature, wrote, "If it has
success, it won't be environmentalism anymore. It
will be something much more important."


SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE HISTORY OF SILICON VALLEY
These excerpts from the Chronicle's recent story
dispel the conventional wisdom that the high-tech
industry grew by bootstrapping and private investment.

High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/30/MNDTSEMSJ.DTL&typ\
e=tech

There is this myth that Silicon Valley was all
orchards when the chip companies arrived, but
it's not true. It had been building, building for
a long time," said Christophe Lecuyer, a
Stanford-trained historian who turned his
dissertation into a book, "Making Silicon Valley."
Lecuyer and Sturgeon argue that, roughly 30 years
before Hewlett and Packard started work in their
garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous
Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of
Silicon Valley was forming around radio:
engineers who hung out in hobby clubs,
brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new
companies out of old ones, and established a
meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic
products cheaper, faster and better.
But in this rivalry with the industrial powers of
the East, the future Silicon Valley would find a
powerful customer with deep pockets - the U.S. military.
Sturgeon said U.S. naval officials, impressed by
Federal Telegraph's technology, gave the Palo
Alto firm huge contracts during World War I - the
first but not the last time war would fuel the region's tech firms.

Another seminal event was the 1939 invention of
the klystron tube by Stanford research associates
and brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, who would
later start Varian Associates. The klystron tube
led to more powerful radars, helping the United
States and its allies gain an advantage in World War II.
In his 1995 memoir, "The HP Way," Packard himself
provides a glimpse of this ecosystem in action,
telling how Terman arranged for him to work evenings at Litton's shop.
Garage-era Silicon Valley also adopted the
business model of the radio age - supplying the U.S. armed forces.
"Military funding was critical for the rise of
Silicon Valley from the very late 1930s to the
early 1960s," Lecuyer said. For instance, he
said, Eitel-McCullough had about 15 people making
vacuum tubes before the war. That swelled to
4,000 employees in 1943, then contracted to 200
in 1945, when peace crippled demand for tubes.

The early chip industry, like the two waves of
innovation before, initially depended on military
expenditures, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the
Smithsonian Institution, writes in his book "A History of Modern Computing."
Only this time, it was the Cold War that opened the government's checkbook.
The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957,
prodded the United States to modernize its
missile and space program. The newfangled silicon
chips were considered vital - albeit costly -
components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the
Defense Department bought so many "that the price
dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30."

Falling chip prices fueled development of new
electronics for corporate customers and
eventually individual consumers. Reliance on
military purchases lessened, though defense
dollars remained important in spurring research.
Thus, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later
dreamed up Google, a defense research grant
helped support their work. And when Stanford
computer scientists won a robotic car race in
2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
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