[Vision2020] Book reviews

[lfalen]

I mentioned breakthrough because it recommend solving problems through technology not excessive regulation. I realize they would use government to do this. While some business incentives would be justified, it should basically be left up to the free market. I said that the approach of breakthrough and  A contract with Earth are different. 
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: "Ted Moffett" starbliss at gmail.com
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:09:17 -0800
To: lfalen lfalen at turbonet.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Book reviews

> 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
> >
> >
> 
>