• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6774 0

the same time, as a result of buying insurance by starting the transition to clean energy, we would become competitive in what is sure to become the next great global industry. Even if global warming did not exist at all, the fact that the planet is on track to move from 6.8 billion people today to 9.2 billion by 2050, and more and more of these people will indeed live in American-size homes, drive American-size cars, and eat American-size Big Macs, means that global energy demand for oil, coal, and gas will surge. Fossil fuels will therefore become more expensive, and the pollution they cause will increase. This will raise the demand for clean, renewable energy, and rising demand will stimulate an increasing supply. There is every reason to believe, in other words, that clean energy will become the successor to information technology as the next major cutting-edge industry on which the economic fortunes of the richest countries in the world will depend. That is the bet that China has made in its twelfth five-year plan, authorized in March 2011, which stresses that development of renewable energy will be the key to China’s energy security for the next decade. That plan places special emphasis on developing solar and nuclear energy.

Moreover, renewable energy depends on new technology, which the United States has historically led the world in developing. China is now seeking to seize that position. “Chinese solar panel manufacturers accounted for slightly over half the world’s production last year,” Keith Bradsher, the New York Times Hong Kong business reporter, wrote (January 14, 2011). “Their share of the American market has grown nearly sixfold in the last two years, to 23 percent in 2010, and is still rising fast … In addition to solar energy, China just passed the United States as the world’s largest builder and installer of wind turbines.” Bradsher also noted that since 2007, China has become the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost. “While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month,” Bradsher wrote (May 10, 2009). China is also building far more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined.

America does not have in place the rules, standards, regulations, and price signals—the market ecosystem—to stimulate thousands of green innovators in thousands of green garages to devise the breakthrough technologies that will give us multiple sources of abundant, cheap, reliable, carbon-free energy. Solar “is an industry we pioneered and invented,” explained Phyllis Cuttino, the director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Clean Energy Program. “We used to be the leading manufacturer of solar in the world, and now the largest manufacturers of solar and wind are China and Germany. In 2008, we led the world in private investment and financing of clean energy. In 2009 China took the lead at $54 billion, Germany is attracting $41 billion, and we are at $34 billion.”

A key reason for the rise of Germany and China in clean power, Cuttino noted, is that they both used “domestic policy tools to create huge internal demand.” If we set high energy-efficiency standards for our own buildings, trucks, cars, and power plants, we would trigger innovation by American companies, which would then be better positioned to compete globally. If, on the other hand, we lower those standards, we invite competition from low-cost, low-standards competitors.

Beyond the potential for spawning new industries, taking climate change and our oil addiction seriously would surely bring strategic advantages. Led by Ray Mabus, President Obama’s secretary of the navy and the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the navy and marines are not waiting. Using their own resources, they have been building a strategy for “out-greening” al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the world’s petro-dictators. Their efforts derive from a Pentagon