Letter to President Obama on Climate Change: From the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

(Center for Climate and Security) The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAS, recently released a set of recommendations for President Obama on addressing climate change. The top-line recommendations include:

... From a climate and security lens, this all seems like sound advice. Read the full letter here. READ MORE

• Accelerate efforts to reduce the regulatory obstacles to deployment of CCS, and continue political support for the large CCS projects currently underway. Successful demonstration of CCS will provide a role for coal in a carbon-constrained future. CCS will eventually be necessary for other large, stationary sources of CO2, including natural gas power plants and biofuel refineries. In February 2010, you created the Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage, charging it with proposing “a plan to overcome the barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of carbon capture and storage within 10 years, with a goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects online by 2016.”3 The Task Force issued a report in August 2010, recommending reforms including better
Federal coordination and several possible approaches to managing long-term liability. We recommend that these findings be the basis for a directive to the relevant officials. There are several commercial CCS projects underway in the United States that have received grants
from the Department of Energy (DOE). Continued support for these projects is important not only for the purpose of establishing the technical and regulatory basis for CCS in the United States, but also because U.S. support for and success with this technology will likely be influential in moving other countries such as China and India toward CCS use.

(4) Sustain research on next-generation clean-energy technologies, and remove obstacles for their eventual deployment. Some technologies are far from being economically competitive today, but are very likely to be important contributors to a low-carbon energy system several decades from now. Examples include electric cars, geothermal heat pumps, and advanced biofuels. As the Nation
works to lower greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, it is critical that investments in “game-changing” research and development on advanced energy technologies continue in order to ensure that at least some of them become competitive in the years ahead.
Climate-modeling studies have demonstrated that the climate system responds above all to cumulative emissions of the longest-lived major greenhouse gas, CO2, which means that reducing total CO2 emissions to near zero as quickly as possible should be the primary aim.
Short-term emissions goals, as emphasized in section 2 above, are important for encouraging the growth of low-carbon technologies and increasing energy efficiency. But the development of critical technologies needed to achieve deeper reductions in the long run –such as next-generation nuclear power, CCS, and electric and fuel-cell cars – is crucial and should not be neglected. A balance is needed between investments that will lower emissions in the near-term and investments, such as “game-changing” research on advanced energy
technology that may have only a small effect on emissions over the next few years but will be critical to achieving success in the long run.

• We recommend that you sustain and, if possible, augment the investment in research and development in energy innovation, focusing on the critical technologies that have the potential to dramatically lower our greenhouse gas emissions in the long run. In the last four years, the DOE has pioneered several new efforts including the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), energy innovation hubs, and energy frontier research centers. (Examples of important areas include energy storage, fast-charging batteries, advanced biofuels, and new nuclear reactor designs.) We suggest that you continue to support such efforts and augment them where possible. And we suggest that new emphasis be placed on creative management and reform of applied research programs in nuclear, fossil fuels, renewables, and energy efficiency, taking lessons from the success of ARPA-E. READ MORE