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<div>Roger et. al.</div>
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<div>Thanks for the book recommendation...<br> </div>
<div>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.</div>
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<div>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?:</div>
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<div><a href="http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2008-January/050888.html">http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2008-January/050888.html</a></div>
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<div><br><pre><a href="http://www.thebreakthrough.org/breakthroughbook.shtml">http://www.thebreakthrough.org/breakthroughbook.shtml</a></pre><pre>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. ------------------------ <a href="http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml">http://www.thebreakthrough.org/stories.shtml</a>7. 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 </pre>
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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/29/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">lfalen</b> <<a href="mailto:lfalen@turbonet.com">lfalen@turbonet.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>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.<br>
Roger<br><br></blockquote></div>