[Vision2020] Book reviews

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Wed Jan 30 00:09:17 PST 2008


Roger et. al.

Thanks for the book recommendation...

If you were following Vision2020 earlier this month, Sunday, Jan. 13, you
might recall that I posted about this book, "Breakthrough," with the title
in the post's subject heading.

I recently watched and listened to an hour long speech and question and
answer session with the authors on C-Span.  They advocate a massive
government investment program in alternative energy, similar to the Apollo
program to put a man (I wish it had been a women) on the moon, so I think
Roger might not really like what they advocate.  Or do I have Roger's views
wrong?:

http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2008-January/050888.html


http://www.thebreakthrough.org/breakthroughbook.shtml

In the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy
with their essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it they argued
that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with
global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept
up. Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new
can be born. Now, three years later, Break Through delivers on the
authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new century, one
focused on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits.
If environmentalists and progressives are to seize the moment offered
by the collapse of the Bush presidency, they must break from "the
politics of limits," and grapple with some inconvenient truths of
their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms have failed.
The nations that ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their
greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest
deforestation has accelerated. What the new ecological crises demand
is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global
warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of
economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy
before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and
microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the
European Union - those breakthroughs were only made possible by big
and bold investments in the future. The era of small thinking is over,
the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and
interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on
uncommon greatness as the common good. Break Through offers more than
policy prescriptions and demands more than casual consideration. With
its challenge to conventional environmentalist, conservative, and
progressive thought, and its proposal for a politics of possibility,
Break Through will influence the political debate for years to come.
------------------------
http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml7. The Cold War,
Computers, and the Internet A model for the creation of the new energy
economy Just as national security concerns drove the U.S. government
to invest in computer and the Internet during the cold war, national
security concerns today should motivate large-scale investments into
clean energy.In early 2007, there was a spate of breathless media
reports announcing that clean energy would be to the early
twenty-first century what computers and the Internet were to the late
twentieth. The coverage described venture capitalist investments in
everything from biofuels made from bioengineered algae to
nanotech-based solar cells to next-generation ethanol as evidence that
the transition to a clean-energy economy was already under way. What
was largely missing from the hoopla was the recognition that none of
the private sector investments in high-tech, computers, and the
Internet would ever have occurred had the U.S. government not invested
billions of the public's money in research and development and
infrastructure in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Companies like
Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Intel would not exist had the Defense
Department not guaranteed the market for microchips and invented the
predecessor to the Internet (Arpanet) in the 1960s and 70s.The
Internet (originally Arpanet) was created by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, which was set up in response to the Soviet
Union's launching of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. In the
1970s, the Defense Department effectively guaranteed the market for
microchips. And the field of computer science would today be a
marginal discipline had the federal government not spent billions on
academic scholarships, fellowships, and other training programs, to
lure the best and brightest young minds into the field. It wasn't just
computers. The invention of today's giant wind turbines was stimulated
by incentives in the United States and Denmark in the seventies and
eighties. And the first solar photovoltaic cells were created for the
U.S. space program in the 1950s. Big, long-term investments in new
technologies are made only by governments and are almost always
motivated largely by concerns about national security or economic
competitiveness, from the threat of the Soviet Union in the 1950s to
OPEC in the 1970s. Governments make the long-term investments in R&D
and infrastructure, and the private sector capitalizes on them to
develop specific products. The problem is that similarly big,
long-term investments are not being made in clean energy. The Stern
Review notes that the roughly $33 billion invested each year on
supporting clean-energy technological deployment (that amount includes
nuclear) is "dwarfed by the existing subsidies for fossil fuels
worldwide that are estimated at $150 billion to $250 billion each
year." It is for this reason that today, non-hydropower sources of
clean energy-biomass, wind, geothermal, and solar-still represent only
2 percent of the world's electricity. In announcing the Apollo space
project, Kennedy said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade not
because it is easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will
serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills;
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we
are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win." While
pushing for R&D investments in clean — energy technology might seem an
obvious job for the environmental lobby in Washington, the truth is
that pollution — oriented environmental groups have never prioritized
those investments. As a result, public investment in energy research
and development in the United States dropped from an already modest $8
billion in 1980 to $3 billion in 2005 (in 2002 dollars). Less than a
half billion is for clean energy. In energy, as in computers and
biotechnology, private investment capital follows public investment.
Private venture capital during the same period dropped from $4 billion
in 1980 to a paltry $1 billion in 2005. By way of comparison, a single
biotechnology firm, Amgen, invested more than $2.3 billion in R&D in
2005. What's needed is a portfolio of strategic, long-term
investments. Government procurement of new technologies should be
dramatically increased, public-private partnerships pursued, training
programs created, prizes offered for technological breakthroughs, and
international research collaboration encouraged. It's not just
research and development that needs funding, but also the creation of
pilot projects, and the deployment of new technologies, ramping them
up over time. With computer science and, more recently, biotechnology
as the models, these public investments offer the promise of creating
a vibrant new industry capable of driving economic growth for decades
to come. Read more in Chapter Five, "The Death of Environmentalism" in
Break Through. ------------------------------------------- Vision2020
Post: Ted Moffett

On 1/29/08, lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote:
>
>
> Break through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of
> Possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael  Shellenberger and A Contract with
> Earth by Newt Gingrich. Nordhaus and Shallenberger are liberals and their
> approach is some what different than Gingrich's.  Both books stress solving
> environmental problems with biotechnology and the free market.  Gingrich of
> course puts more emphasis  on the the free market. Both are worth reading.
> Roger
>
>
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