No Bill Gates, We Don’t Need ‘Energy Miracles’ To Solve Climate Change

by Joe Romm (Think Progress) For six years, Bill Gates has been arguing that we need “energy miracles” to avoid catastrophic climate change. For six years, he has been wrong.

In fact, Gates is more wrong now than he was in 2010. Why? Because in the last six years, we have seen that aggressive deployment of clean energy technology driven by government policies has — as was predicted — led to precisely the kind of game-changing cost-slashing innovation that Gates mistakenly thinks happens primarily from basic energy research and development (R&D).

For six years, Gates has claimed we were wildly under-investing in basic energy R&D. Yet, somehow the very thing Gates says he wanted — huge price drops in key low-carbon technologies (like renewables and efficiency) and key enabling technologies (like batteries for storage) — kept happening. The fact is that accelerated deployment policies around the world created economies of scale and brought technologies rapidly down the learning curve ...

Again, this isn’t because of technology “breakthroughs.” We still are waiting for those to pan out — for any type of practical and affordable fusion power after decades of research or for high-temperature superconducting to realize its potential decades after the early “breakthroughs” or for next-generation nuclear power that’s too cheap to meter (as opposed to the reality today, which is too expensive to matter much).

What is particularly unfortunate about Gates’ mistaken rhetoric is that it can disempower people and policymakers and pundits into thinking that individual or even government action is not the central weapon needed to win the climate fight and that our only hope is some long-term deus ex machina strategy to avoid catastrophic warming. Nothing could be worse than leaving people with the impression that humanity’s only hope is future miracles — especially since a quarter-century of largely ignoring the warnings of climate scientists has left us with quite literally no time left to dawdle in exponentially ramping up deployment.

Significantly, “the time of break-even [when an energy technology becomes competitive in the marketplace] depends on deployment rates, which the decision-maker can influence through policy,” as the International Energy Agency explained in great detail way back in 2000 in its report, “Experience Curves for Energy Technology Policy.”

As leading climatologist Michael Mann points out on Twitter, Gates basically claims credit for coming up with a way to conceptualize the CO2 problem that was in fact developed by someone else two decades ago who has his own Wikipedia entry.

I coauthored an article in the April 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly on this very subject. The article warned that “Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America’s leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment…” In recent years, I’ve continued to advocate for ramping up RDD&D funding in books and on this website.

And while it is true that governments still underinvest in basic energy R&D, unlike the 1990s, now corporations and venture capitalists have filled up a significant portion of the gap. Why? Because scientific reality and government policies around the world have made it clear that low carbon and zero carbon technologies would soon become a trillion-dollar industry.

As I wrote at the time, while a boost in cleantech R&D funding is always welcome, what is most needed now is money for accelerated deployment and project financing of technologies that are now market-ready. Low or zero-interest loans and loan guarantees can leverage money 50-to-1 (since default rates are 2 percent or less). With $2 billion, you could create a $100 billion revolving fund for backing clean tech projects — which is getting to the scale of investment we need.

Moreover, no one I know of is saying that increased R&D isn’t useful or even very important. We are saying that it isn’t the best use of his money — and that if we don’t vastly expand deployment now, all the R&D in the world is not going to come to fruition in time to avoid catastrophic global warming.

As one technologist wrote me six years ago of Gates: “The man built his career on shipping ‘what we have now’ and then improving it, using programmers paid out of the revenues gained from shipping not-quite-yet-ready product…. His business strategy for his entire life was antithetical to the [Bjorn] Lomborg nonsense ‘don’t do anything until the Big Research Lab In The Sky Makes It Perfect’.”

We simply don’t have the time to wait for Energy Miracles, and Gates simply hasn’t proposed the best strategy to achieve his wish — dramatic improvement in performance and a sharp drop in price.

The time to act — to deploy — is now. READ MORE and MORE (New York Times) and MORE (The Verge) and MORE (The Atlantic (2015 interview))