Winning Recipe
Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. — Mark Twain
The science is settled around climate change. The action plan is not.
Beyond the astonishing scientific consensus on human-induced climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, reasonable people disagree on what to do. Delays in implementing important policies worldwide have heightened the urgency to act, and during the last 20 years, we’ve made remarkable progress in deploying efficiency measures and some kinds of clean energy. Still, several years of growing emissions and lack of progress after the 2016 Paris Agreement have largely ended the happy talk in serious policy and business circles. The technology gets better — we do not.
So, what should we all do?
I’ve worked in industry, government and academia. I have my own small business and have worked in large institutions. The bottom line is we know the recipe for creating the future we want. We’ve used it many times already, including in the energy space.
Solar and fracking, nuclear and wind, LEDs and batteries: There’s a specific set of actions we take — in order — to make it all work.
Invest in innovation: Over the past 100 years, important clean energy innovations started with federal and other public research and development funds. These programs helped university, business and government researchers solve vexing problems and make rapid advances towards commercialization.
Government procurement: Solar panels, fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, nuclear reactors, and LEDs all moved from the benchtop to early applications through government purchase, often by the Department of Defense, NASA or the Department of Transportation. These public purchases created early markets and moved these technologies down the cost curve.
Push into markets through policy: A combination of market incentives (like investment tax credits) and regulatory limits (like appliance efficiency standards) created markets where these clean energy innovations could benefit from commercial entrepreneurs and economies of scale, making rapid and profound improvements on cost and performance. These improvements enabled further policy measures such as renewable portfolio standards without unreasonable fiscal commitments. For climate change, policy measures are essential to create and expand these markets and provide competitive landscapes for cleaner tech.
Innovate in business and finance: This is where America shines. Once markets are aligned with policy outcomes, independent financiers, entrepreneurs and business leaders unleash their own innovations and capital to create new jobs and industries, develop export technologies and markets, and reinvent the present into the future while creating wealth.
This recipe is most important for those approaches that have not yet cleared into widespread markets. Advanced nuclear, the next wave of solar and batteries, carbon capture technology, CO2 recycling, and other approaches require additional support and investment. We need more options, not fewer.
Two individuals embodied and mastered the recipe set nearly a century ago. Vannevar Bush served President Roosevelt before and during World War II. Bush created the modern scientific enterprise in 1939 with two massive scientific and technical efforts: the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Knowing that we needed more than we had to beat the Axis powers, his efforts delivered many critical innovations that helped the Allies win. These large public investments in research, design and development engendered the first round of government procurements for the innovations that followed.
Daniel Guggenheim created aviation business. He made supply chains and whole enterprises, and helped drive public policy to support them. He also invested some of his personal fortune in fundamental math, science and engineering, mirroring and augmenting public investments. Together, the efforts and investments stimulated by Bush and Guggenheim created the modern aviation industry and U.S. military superiority.
The recipe is the same for clean energy and climate, and the potential commercial and national benefits are equally great. The punchline is that there is much we can do to rapidly reduce and even reverse greenhouse gas emissions. Not much can be done individually — most of the recipe must be organized and executed at the state, national or international level, or by companies in the private sectors. To that end, the central task for citizens is to elect individuals who care about the topic of clean energy and who seek to act.
S. Julio Friedmann graduated from USC Dornsife with a Ph.D. in geology in 1995. He was principal deputy for fossil energy at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2013–16, and chief energy technologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He lives in Livermore, California, with his wife, also a graduate of USC, and two children.
Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2019 issue >>