This shindig was more or less a publicity event for the book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility”.  The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, debated with New York Times Reporter Andrew Revkin over certain aspects of climate change, technology affecting it, and politics.  Basically they sit on their high horse and tell us what we are doing wrong, why there is so little that can be done about it, and what George Bush has done wrong.

These authors have described how yes, there are many green energy sources out there that can be tapped into.  Wind power in the Dakotas, Solar in the South West, etc.  However their comments on this were basically, industry will not more towards these resources because of the extremely high initial costs and very high research costs.  Their argument is that the government must step in to pick up the slack.  The public utilities don’t exist to support such wind farms or photovoltaic arrays as are needed.  There are no high voltage power lines running to these remote regions, and without these there cannot be any development of the renewable resources.

The argument makes sense, the government spent massive sums of money in the 50′s and 60′s to build up the technology of microprocessors.  While I partially agree that the government should pick up part of the tab, private industry needs to understand something.  If they keep with the path they are on, in 40 or 50 years they will be out of resources to generate power out of.  Oil will be very close to gone, coal will be pretty much all that is left.  Without renewable resources to generate power from, they will collapse and fail as a company.  They need to invest in their own future.  They need to stop looking to governments to bail them out.

It is this mindset that the government will bail you out that is going to cause massive problems in the private sector of energy; but not just energy, it will cause problems in all sectors.

There are companies out there that are investing in their future, and I tip my hat to you.  However the logic behind this book is fundamentally flawed in that they say the energy sector does not have the resources to secure its own future.  This is a lie.  They, like all business, can invest in their own future and they MUST invest in their own future.

During the question and answer session, the first question was why not nuclear?  The French get something like 80% of their power from nuclear, why are we so afraid it?  For the first time during this discussion, the authors have made some great comments, nuclear is a good idea.  Mr. Revkin went on to say that essentially, the nuclear industry can take care of itself.  It doesn’t need looking out for, it gets what it needs from Washington.

What about just giving clean power systems to developing nations?  This is a very good in my opinion, throw out the capitalism and get the people who haven’t established their bad habits yet to start with good ones while we play catchup.  Our economy and private industry cannot just change over instantly, but we can help those who are developing get there before us so we can take the much rockier road of playing catch up.

What about the unintended consequences of our efforts to fix global warming?  With our efforts to develop alternative fuels to oil, we may have inadvertantly driven up the cost of food world wide.  The authors argue that this will always, and has always happened.  We must keep trying to fix the problems while at the same time minimizing the unintended consequences.  These consequences can be both positive and negative but we must accept both and do the best we can with both.  We cannot pick and choose.

Would it be better to stimulate other countries to get the US into competition with them?  Most of the major government investments were made during periods of high competition with other nations.  Would it be best for us to get into a compeitition with them so that congress would be more willing to put more money towards the development of better sources of energy?  It worked for the space race, WWII, the Manhattan Project, development of microchips, and many other projects.  I think it would actually be good for us to get into another race.  These races are almost as good for an economy as a war, without the nasty crash at the end.

The general consensus is that there needs to be major investments in power generation technology.  However what people cannot seem to agree upon is where this money will come from and how to light a fire under the asses of those who have the money to make these investments.  I personally thing it needs to be a combination of both government and private sector investments.  Without the investments, the energy sector will fail, and our environment will fail with it.