Long knives, Part II

I’ve held off on doing this post for more than a week now. Insider backbiting is tremendously entertaining, but it leaves the spectators (and the scribe) feeling somewhat tawdry for enjoying it a bit too much. That said, it is indeed fun, so here goes.

As readers of this blog know, I have played a minor supporting role recently in the worsening catfight between the climate policy world’s two most prominent bloggers – the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin and the Center for American Progress’ Joe Romm. Revkin has positioned himself as a centrist and an advocate of the breakthrough technologies camp, while Romm is an avatar of the more liberal camp that advocates an immediate broadening of regulations mandating the use of energy-efficiency technologies.

Their rivalry has become bitter, with Revkin dissing Romm and Romm returning the favor in spades. 

Last week, Revkin posted a new attack on Romm (and, briefly, me). The subject was the back-and-forth debate over a study by the California Council on Science and Technology earlier this year. Revkin pointed to a new research study published last month in Science, The Technology Path to Deep Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts by 2050: The Pivotal Role of Electricity. Revkin claimed it offered further proof of his position that California and the United States should put top priority on a massive infusion of government funds to clean energy R&D projects. His essay (and associated video excerpts) focused on Romm, Romm and more Romm. 

Revkin goaded Nathan Lewis, the head of a federal R&D program on breakthrough technologies for fuels from sunlight, into painting Romm as a quasi-Luddite:

... it’s different than people [i.e. Romm] who would tell you that we have all the technology we need and we just need the political will and let’s be done with it. That’s not what any technically knowledgeable panel concludes.

You can see Revkin's arteries nearly bursting with anger:

One thing Romm forgets (or chooses to ignore) when he tries to rebut me is that I’m not debating him; I’m consuming his arguments, along with output from a host of people directly involved in energy research and analysis.

I'm not debating you, I'm consuming you! Oohhh.

But beyond the schoolyard putdowns, let's look at the actual results of the new Science study. Like the California Council study, it concludes that new technologies are indeed needed to reach the ultimate goal of 80 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050. But both also seem to agree that stiffened energy efficiency rules and other regulatory policies can reach more than 50 percent reduction by 2050. Here is the breakdown of emissions reductions projected in the Science study:

• 28 percent: energy efficiency, especially from the buildings sector.
• 27 percent: low-carbon electricity generation, such as renewable energy, nuclear power, and fossil fuel-powered generation coupled with carbon capture and storage.
• 16 percent: electrification of cars, space and water heaters, and industrial processes that consume fuel and natural gas.
• 15 percent: measures to reduce non-energy related CO2and other greenhouse gas emissions, such as from landfill and agricultural activities.
• 14 percent: various unrelated technologies and practices such as "smart growth" urban planning, biofuels for the trucking and airline industry, and rooftop solar photovoltaics.

How much of all that reflects technologies that are not currently existing, in the pipeline or to be expected under current levels of R&D funding, and how much would require markedly greater levels of funding? The study doesn't say.

That's the crucial question, of course. It's the crux of the dispute between the Revkin camp and the Romm camp, and it hasn't been answered fully by anyone. But the Science study does offer a reasonable conclusion that broadly supports Romm's conclusions: while R&D breakthroughs are needed for the long term, the first step in any coherent strategy for emissions reduction must be stricter energy efficiency regulations, which in turn will help drive the development of new technologies:

Infrastructure deployment and technology investment require coordination. (…) we found that achieving the infrastructure changes described above will require major improvements in the functionality and cost of a wide array of technologies and infrastructuresystems, including but not limited to cellulosic and algal biofuels, CCS, on-grid energy storage, electric vehicle batteries, smart charging, building shell and appliances, cement manufacturing, electric industrial boilers, agriculture and forestry practices, and source reduction/capture of high-GWP emissions from industry.

Not only must these technologies and systems be commercially ready, they must also be deployed in a coordinated fashion to achieve their hoped-for emission reduction benefits at acceptable cost.

(...) The logical sequence of deployment for the main components of this transformation is energy efficiency first, followed by decarbonization of generation, followed by electrification. This transformation will require electrification of most direct uses of oil and gas. 

A recent report by ClimateWorks Foundation came to similar conclusions. The report, Policies That Work: How to Build a Low-Emissions Economy, emphasized 10 central policy initiatives, with a primary focus on regulatory strengthening and energy efficiency:

1. Vehicle performance standards
2. Fuel and vehicle levies
3. Energy efficiency standards and labels
4. Clean energy supply policies
5. Utility-scale energy efficiency programs
6. Industrial energy efficiency programs
7. Effectively enforced building codes
8. Properly aligned economic incentives
9. "Smart growth" urban design
10. Support for R&D and innovation

(Disclosure: I have previously done consulting work for ClimateWorks, although I am not doing so now and did not work on that report.)

The basic message of all these reports is akin to Romm's mantra: Deploy, deploy, R&D, deploy, deploy -- but all simultaneously.

Still, catfighting is more fun, and it replicates the broader centrists-vs-liberals ideological divide in environmental politics and the Democratic Party. Don't expect it to subside anytime soon.

Note: This post has been updated.

Comments

[Revkin]

When virtual knives (or charges of Charlie Sheen moments) aren't flying, Joe and I clearly agree on the false dichotomy of deploy OR invent/innovate. I've said this; he's said this. In my video interview with Nate Lewis of Caltech in the relevant post, he said this as well. Two parts are here: http://www.youtube.com/revkin

I stress innovation and R&D because they are deeply discounted in our politics and discourse, which are torqued toward the near term and off the shelf (even at a big price premium). Joe stresses massive deployment, which is his privilege.

My take also draws on the wisdom of people like Lewis, the Caltech scientist who runs one of the federal energy innovation hubs. Here's a bit more from our Q&A in case you don't have time to listen to the tape:

Revkin: There’s all this, to me, false drama about deployment versus innovation or whatever. To my mind, and I think to your mind, this is hardly an either or situation, is that fair to say?

Lewis: It’s not even hardly either-or. It’s an and-and or it won’t get done.

Revkin: How important is it to factor in building our intellectual infrastructure even as we work on these questions about changing our energy infrastructure?

Lewis: You cannot get to where we need to go with just what we know how to do today. Which means we need to learn to not only evolve faster, better, cheaper what we know how to do today, we also need to do things we don’t know how to do today. That doesn’t mean you don’t start now doing what you know how to do. It does mean that you shouldn’t have your head in the sand and know that 40 yards away you can’t get from here to there because the Grand Canyon is in between and you never built a bridge. So if you really cared about meeting the target, if you really cared about making sure that the odds were stacked in your favor, if that’s what you really carted about, you would be deploying, you would be lowering costs and you would be having multiple options to figure out a way to do the stuff that we don’t know how to do so that we would succeed. If you don’t care about succeeding and you just care about pushing your agenda then you would leave out that last key step and I’m not willing to bet the Earth on leaving it out.

[Robert Collier]

Andy Revkin's comments above are instructive. His initial reasonableness quickly gives way to the rhetorically sloppy bashing of Romm-like straw men: "It does mean that you shouldn’t have your head in the sand and know that 40 yards away you can’t get from here to there because the Grand Canyon is in between and you never built a bridge. So if you really cared about meeting the target, if you really cared about making sure that the odds were stacked in your favor, if that’s what you really cared about, you would be deploying, you would be lowering costs and you would be having multiple options to figure out a way to do the stuff that we don’t know how to do so that we would succeed. If you don’t care about succeeding and you just care about pushing your agenda then you would leave out that last key step and I’m not willing to bet the Earth on leaving it out."

This is typical of the Dot Earth piece and videos. There may (or may not) be a "false dichotomy" between Revkin and Romm in substantive terms, as Revkin says. But certainly not in rhetorical and political terms.

[Revkin]

Hmm. Your complaint shouldn't be with me but with Nate Lewis. That's Nate -- one of the world's most highly regarded practitioners in energy research -- speaking, not me. And, as Nate explains, this is not a "he said, she said" issue in any case. His interview responses are built around two exhaustive analyses by collections of energy, climate and economic experts.

[Robert Collier]

Andy, you framed the question, chose the Nate Lewis quote and cited it as supporting your argument. The straw men are yours.

[Matthew Stepp]

Moving passed the pie throwing, something that hasn't come up in the Robert/Roberts/Revkin/CEF Study fight is that the study doesn't include cost or really much in the way of tech performance in their analysis. They assume some broad cost assumptions from other reports, but their not central to their analysis.

So on one hand, yes, California can get to 60% reductions with existing tech (a term not defined really until they release their technology studies). But on the other hand that assumes California picks up the significant cost difference or consumers are suddenly willing to purchase more expensive electricity or businesses absorb significantly higher energy costs at a loss to their competitive advantage. Regulation or not, there are significant economic consequences excluded from the studies "portraits" assuming existing tech.

I can imagine taking into account tech costs and performance would significantly lower that 60% number in real world terms. That's not a political problem, but a real economic one. The study even notes that it's concerned of the high capital investments needed to meet these targets. Now I understand that including costs and performance was not part of the studies scope, but as policy analyst, it has to be taken into account. Brushing it off and assuming we can will our way to these goals doesn't seem helpful.

It seems reasonable to look at past reg/standard situations that show that usually a viable, cheap tech alternative precedes it's deployment through the standard, not the other way around (ex. SOX scrubbers and clean air). The new vehicle standards are another good example - the car companies know the tech exists and it won't jack up the price of their cars, so they agreed to the standard.

Further, the report doesn't assume emission leakage - something I can imagine will happen if businesses move elsewhere because energy costs become too high. And these no-cost-constrained, existing technology portraits aren't a global solution. We're talking about global warming, not California warming, so we need technologies that are viable everywhere. The rest of the world can't subsidize, long-term, existing technologies like we think we can(which it should be obvious given austerity that we cannot).

So I guess at the end of the day, my thought is - clean energy technology readiness is the fundamental policy question. Innovation includes deployment and regs and R&D, but as long as it's done in a smart way of which some of our R&D and most of our regs and subsidies are not done so. As such, I would love to work with folks to make all of our energy policies innovation-oriented.

It's a big policy debate that needs to happen and more so than what has happened around the CEF report.

[solar panels information]

They seem to be fighting, but both are actually aiming for the same thing - the success of renewable energy technology.