Message to the President of the United States
Osamah
new_technologies_positions.pdf
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 1
POSITION #1: WE NEED FUNDAMENTALLY NEW TECHNOLOGIES
• Read and understand the handout.
• Identify the most important points made by the position represented.
• Think of potential strengths and weaknesses of the position.
• Prepare notes covering the points you plan to share with the larger group.
Some experts believe we will not be able to meet the climate challenge without fundamentally new technologies. The federal government is already funding research into new technologies that could help reduce carbon emissions. Research funded by the Department of Energy includes:
• Carbon sequestration—the capturing and storage of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases.
Options for storage include underground, in terrestrial carbon sinks (like growing forests), and in the ocean
• Improving efficiency of coal and natural gas power systems
• Developing fuel cells (such as hydrogen-powered fuel cell electric cars) that can generate electricity without burning fossil fuels.
• Developing more advanced nuclear power plants (nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases)
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, formerly the US Secretary of Energy, has advocated for increased research and development of these and other technological solutions to slowing climate change:
• Using solar energy to generate chemical fuel at low cost
• Altering yeast and bacteria into organisms that produce gasoline and diesel
• Improving techniques for converting switchgrass and other perennial grass crops into fuel
• Using nanotechnology to improve efficiency of solar panels
• Developing better batteries for storing power
Chu has argued that this research must be supported by the federal government. He claims that private companies are “reluctant to invest in research into transformational technologies that may not see commercialization for 10 years, even though such technologies could dra- matically change the entire energy landscape.” To fill this gap, Chu believes that government support of research at universities and national laboratories is “our only hope to supply the science required to create transformative energy solutions.”
How much money would be needed for the research and development for new technolo- gies to move quickly for the point they were commercially practical? A recent report from the Brookings Institution suggests that $20 to $30 billion a year is necessary. For comparison, the total current budget for the entire Department of Energy is $25 billion a year. The 2014 federal budget was $3.77 trillion ($3,778 billion).
Sources:
Duderstadt, J., Muro, M., Was, G., Sarzynski, A., et al. Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes: A Step
toward America’s Energy Sustainability. The Brookings Institution. 2009.
Mufson, S. "Concern for climate change defines new energy department nominee," Washington Post.
December 12, 2008.
Department of Energy. <http://www.energy.gov/sciencetech/climatechange.htm> Accessed March 9,
2009.
United States Office of Management and Budget, The Budget for Fiscal Year 2014, Summary Tables
accessed May 2014, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2014-BUD-29.pdf
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 2
POSITION #2: WE NEED TO FUND EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR A NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS
• Read and understand the handout.
• Identify the most important points made by the position represented.
• Think of potential strengths and weaknesses of the position.
• Prepare notes covering the points you plan to share with the larger group.
The Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that aims to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and to promote equitable and sustainable prosperity, has proposed a National Energy Education Act (NEEA). The proposal acknowledges the challenge of meeting the world’s energy needs in a way that does not accelerate global warming.
Advocates of expanding national energy education argue that the U.S. needs to be able to develop clean energy technologies to meet global energy needs without accelerating climate change. To do this, they often argue that the U.S. needs to increase support for STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) through these goals:
• Improve quality of and access to education in fields related to energy:
– Increase financial aid and loan forgiveness for students in energy-related fields.
– Support the creation of new multidisciplinary courses of study focused on energy.
– Expand energy-related service learning and work-study opportunities.
– Provide improved training and resources for energy-related education in colleges.
• Increase funding for clean energy research and development at universities.
• Support the development of new workforce training programs in clean
energy industries.
– Increase funding for workforce training programs at technical and community colleges and worker retraining centers.
– Support partnerships with clean energy firms to develop training programs.
• Create “innovation pipelines” to move new products out of research labs and into private sector ventures.
– Support collaboration between government research facilities, universities, and industry to demonstrate new technologies that will be ready for widespread use in the near future.
– Create “research parks” and other forums to encourage communication and transfer of technology between private firms and university research labs.
Advocates of energy education argue that investment in the education of a new generation of scientists and engineers would eventually pay for itself. They argue that these highly-educated people would contribute to the development of new industries and technologies that will drive the U.S. economy in future decades.
It is concerning to proponents of energy education that many of the people currently working in STEM fields will be retiring in the near future. For example, 70% of civilian employees in the Department of Defense with STEM degrees will be eligible to retire in 2015.
One way to measure the amount of progress made in energy education is to observe the growth of those receiving higher education. In 2013, a record 21.8 million students attended colleges and universities, about a 6.5 percent annual growth rate from the year 2000.
Source:
National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372, accessed May 2014.
Policy Concept Draft: National Energy Education Act. The Breakthrough Institute. October 2008.
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 3
POSITION #3: WE HAVE ALL THE TECHNOLOGY WE NEED TO START
DRAMATICALLY REDUCING EMISSIONS
• Read and understand the handout.
• Identify the most important points made by the position represented.
• Think of potential strengths and weaknesses of the position.
• Prepare notes covering the points you plan to share with the larger group.
Advocates of this position cite the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It states atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide could be stabilized at levels as low as 400 to 450 ppm using a range of technologies that are either currently available or are expected to be available in the coming decades. This position assumes the creation of appropriate and effective incentives for development and deployment of these technologies.
To meet stabilization goals, existing technologies would need to be employed on much larger scales than they are today. The technology portfolio needed to achieve stabilization goals would include:
• Energy Supply: improved efficiency, switching from coal to natural gas, nuclear power, renewable energy, carbon capture and storage
• Transportation: improved fuel efficiency, hybrid vehicles, biofuels, rail and public transportation, cycling, walking
• Buildings: improved efficiency, improved insulation, passive and active solar design, “intelligent” buildings that can maximize conservation and efficiency
• Industry: improved efficiency, heat and power recovery, material recycling, control of emissions, improved industrial processes
• Agriculture: improved efficiency, improved land management to increase carbon storage in soils, restoration of degraded lands, improved cultivation and livestock manure management techniques, improved fertilizer application techniques, energy crops to replace fossil fuels, improvements of crop yields
• Forestry: afforestation (planting trees where none were before), reforestation, reduced deforestation, forest management and tree species improvement to increase carbon storage
• Waste management: landfill methane recovery, burning waste for energy, composting organic waste, recycling, reducing waste, waste water recycling
Advocates of this position worry that an insistence that we need technology “breakthroughs” to successfully combat global warming could mean we will end up waiting too long. They argue that because we must dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions over the next 25 years, we cannot wait for the development of new technologies.
They examine the history of technology and claim rapid “breakthroughs” are very rare—instead technology improves slowly. Even when breakthroughs do happen, they rarely “transform” energy markets. They cite Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, reporting that it typically takes 25 years after commercial energy introduction for a new energy form to gain a 1% share of the global market.
They argue that the gains that have been made in energy efficiency and in clean, renewable, and alternative energy technologies have been the result of government mandates, subsidies, and incentives. They argue what is needed are regulations and policy that will encourage increased deployment and development of the
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 3
technologies we already have or will soon have in the near future.
Estimates of the cost of implementing the technologies needed to stabilize the atmosphere at 550 ppm range from 1% to 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the entire world. Meanwhile, economists predict that the impacts of climate change will cost the world anywhere from 5-20% of GDP each year.
Advocates argue that this cost would be far cheaper than the alternative—the collapse of the planet’s vital life-support systems.
Sources:
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Summary for Policy Makers, 2007.
Romm, Joseph. Breaking the technology breakthrough myth. Climate Progress, Center for American Progress. <http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/09/breaking- the-technology-breakthrough-myth-debunking-shellenberger-nordhaus-again/> Accessed March 11, 2009.
Stern, Nicholas. Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom), October 30, 2006.
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 4
POSITION #4: WE’VE WAITED TOO LONG—WE NEED GEO-ENGINEERING TO BUY TIME
• Read and understand the handout.
• Identify the most important points made by the position represented.
• Think of potential strengths and weaknesses of the position.
• Prepare notes covering the points you plan to share with the larger group.
Advocates of geo-engineering fear humanity is taking action too slowly to avoid catastrophic climate changes. They suggest that we could use geo-engineering as a last-chance effort to “buy time” by lowering the temperature on the planet while we try to figure out ways to lower our emissions. Examples of geo-engineering proposals include:
• Build huge floating islands in the ocean made from white plastic. The artificial islands would act like the rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice. The sea ice reflects up to 90% of incoming solar radiation back into space and covers the dark- colored ocean (which can absorb up to 90% of incoming radiation).
• Send trillions of two-feet-wide lenses into orbit around the earth. The lenses would bend sunlight away from earth. Or build 55,000 mirrors in space, each about 100 km2 in size. Potential drawbacks would be the inability to adjust or remove the mirrors once they were in place and the potential they would fall back to earth.
• Use rockets to shoot sulfur particles into the stratosphere. The particles would block incoming solar radiation and have a similar cooling effect as the ash from the eruption of a volcano. The sulfur in the atmosphere would have the side- effect of producing acid rain and of destroying the ozone layer, allowing more damaging ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth.
• Cover deserts with reflective films to send more incoming radiation back into space.
• Bioengineer crops to have more reflective leaves.
• Fertilize the ocean with iron to encourage vast blooms of algae that would capture carbon dioxide. The plants would eventually die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, bringing their carbon with them. Side-effects might include killing the remaining ocean ecosystem.
• Wrap entire glaciers in white, insulating sheets.
• Build 134 million pipes floating vertically in the ocean. The pipes would use the wave-action to pump cold water from deep in the ocean to the surface. The cold water is more biologically productive and could produce more small animals like the salp (it poops carbon pellets which sink to the bottom of the ocean). The colder surface water might also reduce the number and severity of hurricanes, which gain energy from warm water. A side-effect might be the further acidification of the ocean, making it impossible for coral reefs, and the life that depends on them, to survive.
• Use the energy of five thousand, million, million hydrogen bombs to move Earth’s orbit 1.5 million km further away from the sun.
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Lesson 3: New Technologies Do we need them to meet the climate challenge?
Copy Master - Lesson 3- Handout Position 4
Geoengineering faces challenges and protests. They include:
• Some feel the cost and technical difficulty for some of the proposals makes them impractical—at least for now.
• Tinkering with complex systems could produce unintended side-effects. Scientists cannot adequately predict the consequences of making large-scale alterations to the environment.
• These proposals do not address the underlying cause of climate change (increasing emissions of greenhouse gases). They only mask the problem.
• Ethical questions surround whether we can leave future generations a world that requires tinkering on such a large scale in an attempt to maintain livable conditions.
• Ethical questions surround whether certain groups of people can make planet- altering decisions for the rest of the world.
• Perhaps even talking about potential “quick fixes” like these will undermine the political will to work to reduce emissions.
Furthermore, geo-engineering faces push-back from the climate science community. For example, the fourth IPCC report, released in 2007, states that geo-engineering, “remain[s] largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side-effects.” The rerport goes on to state that, “Reliable cost estimates for [geo-engineering] options have not been published.”
Advocates of geoengineering counter that it would be irresponsible to not continue research into these options, in case we fail in our efforts to slow emissions. Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen says geo-engineering “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises.” Advocates are requesting “research funding with enough zeros on it to make a dent.”
Advocates of geo-engineering do not know how much funding would be needed, but it would be tens of billions of dollars. They argue, however, that it would be far cheaper than the alternative—the collapse of the planet’s vital life-support systems.
Sources:
Apple, M. Personal communication, March 11, 2009.
Bentley, M. "Guns and Sunshades to Rescue Climate," BBC News. March 2, 2006.
Black, R. "Lovelock Urges Ocean Climate Fix," BBC News. September 26, 2007.
Broad, W. J. "How to Cool A Planet (Maybe)," New York Times. June 27, 2006.
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policy Makers, 2007. Accessed May 2014
