Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [44]
Action therefore begins with the quest for more, cheaper, and cleaner energy technology, not raising energy prices. And in this regard, the opportunities for making progress are actually quite expansive. Technological advance is largely a process of gradual improvement of existing technologies, and many potential options for clean energy technology already exist as platforms for further improvement. What has been lacking have been a serious, strategic commitment to the appropriate policies and necessary levels of investment that can catalyze clean energy innovation. While technology has always been a faddish, if marginal, presence in the climate policy agenda (we liberals do love hybrid cars and solar power, however expensive), innovation policy has never been taken seriously, and technological progress has generally been treated as if it would automatically and miraculously appear as necessary.14
Moreover, it may turn out that the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions more quickly and decisively than can be achieved even with an aggressive commitment to clean energy innovation. Here liberals have another tool in their arsenal that they have forsaken as a consequence of their technoskepticism. The government has often been a primary investor and customer for new technologies that advance public well-being. The TVA was based on the belief that governments had an obligation to directly invest in public works that could level the social and economic playing field.
Treating greenhouse gas reductions as a public good, like investments in rural electrification, transportation, water and sewerage, national parks, and national defense, would exploit a historically powerful liberal rationale for directly addressing technological problems that lack marketplace solutions. This public good-public works approach has the political benefit of being relatively transparent in terms of motives and costs, unlike the ridiculously complex, too-clever-by-a-half approaches to climate policy of the past 20 years.
A public goods-public works approach could provide new political options for attacking climate and energy problems directly, for example through the capture and storage of carbon dioxide from power plants. Here our friend the TVA, a public enterprise that operates 11 coal-fired plants with nearly 60 generating units, may offer opportunities.15 Congress could direct and fund TVA to explore carbon dioxide capture technologies and to demonstrate them at increasing scale.16 This would be an appropriate next generation public good mission for a public works program rooted in liberal values and a commitment to the role of technology in advancing those values.
Since the decisive crash of the international and US climate policy frameworks in 2009, liberals have at last begun to more seriously embrace energy innovation in the United States, but with some palpable sense that they are regretfully adopting “Plan B,” rather than doing what they should have done from the beginning. Unfortunately, 20 years of fruitless fighting over the science and politics of reducing risk by making energy more expensive has so utterly alienated conservatives from the very idea of climate change, that a program of energy innovation that would once have been potentially appealing to many conservatives for its wealth-creating, competitiveness-enhancing potential now risks being viewed on the Right as a Trojan horse for failed climate policies.
Thus, the political debacle