Hansen to Obama Pt IV – Where to from here?

So Barry, what are your opinions on the above?

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A few thoughts:

1) Is conservation even mentioned? Not that I could see. Based just on California’s experience, rather a lot can be accomplished, at least in developed countries.

2) Hansen seems to be depending on the carbon tax to make the low-hanging fruit of conservation and efficiency happen. While plausible to a degree, I think a point of excess retardation of economic activity would be reached rather before enough C+E would be impelled. I see no downside to identifying an obvious range of steps such as density/anti-sprawl requirements for new development, appliance efficiency standards and energy efficiency retrofitting of the existing building stock. He does mention building code changes, but provides no details. See this interesting program for an example of the sort of thing that might be very appealing in developed countries at least.

3) It seems odd to limit R+D to nuclear and CCS. Why not crash programs to improve existing technology for solar power, batteries and LED light bulbs, e.g., and develop new ideas like this? Another important aspect of R+D is to extend a carrot to developing countries by committing to adapting and developing technology suitable for their level of development.

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I find it hard to fault any of that to be honest.

Other than favouring cap and trade… but I certainly would not lose any sleep if it were a tax, and I hope Hansen would applaud a genuine cap and trade were it introduced in the next few years. The downsides of both can be managed. POlitically I think cap and trade is much closer to acceptance than the tax however.

He did miss one priority: “Lower expectations of wealth and comfort.” By which I mean would it really hurt us to use less electricity at night, wake at dawn and sleep at sunset, no aircon. We could all still live pretty amazing lives without much of our energy consumption.

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‘Just countless bleak years lying ahead when we’ll really appreciate what adaption means.’

Like you Barry, I don’t see the sustainability crisis being overcome. Climate change is only one of many unfolding environmental disasters caused by humans. The human population cannot be sustained at its current level, destroying ever increasing amounts of the biosphere and further diminishing the population carrying capacity of the earth.

I don’t share the religious like faith of many that we can invent new and improved technologies that will solve the world’s problems. Our society is vulnerable because of its complexity – our systems and technology are increasingly becoming so complex that they are no longer fully understood or controlled. New technology is also subject to diminishing returns on investment making ‘eureka’ discouveries unlikely.

Take the present global financial crisis. It is becoming clearer by the day that we also have no idea how to stop it running its course. The actions taken to date to prop up financial countries are not only failing, they may  bankrupt countries. Just imagine what a moderate fuel shortage would do to our logistics and transport systems and what the flow on consequences would be to our society.

The one given with technologies is that without exception they all add to the pollution and degradation of our habitat. Our ancestors changed the vegetation of continents with the use of fire and agriculture, and, wiped out mega fauna with primitive weapons. Modern industrial processes and consumer waste are polluting and destroying ecosystems globally. 

My raging anger at our collective stupidity burnt bright during the last years of the twentieth century. It has been replaced with a nihilistic sadness as the melting ice, drying of the sub-equatorial zones and a resumption in the rise of atmospheric methane levels indicate climate change is now beyond human prevention.

The damage of climate change will be matched by the devestation caused as our unsustainable population consumes an ever increasing amount of the fast diminishing biota, fresh water and other resources of the planet while polluting land, water and air with our industrial waste.

What will remain in a thousand years – who knows. Most of the species alive today will have disappeared. There may still be small populations of humans around the world living in a far from Utopian post technological society.

Then again Homo sapiens may be included in the vast number of species that will die out in the now unfolding great Anthropocene extinction event.

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Interesting book for green technophiles reviewed here: “ten technologies to save the planet”; I note nuclear is not on the list.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16179-ten-ways-to-save-the-world.html
I’d note that politically speaking, too vigourous pushing of new nuclear power has the potential to split the fragile green-general public anti-global-warming consensus, which would be used by governments to do nothing. Nuclear is fourth, not first, on Hansen’s list of five priorities, yet he has devoted most of this open letter to talking about it. In my opinion it should be about seventh. What is needed more urgently is rollout of existing high efficiency technology to the developing world. Ultimately we can’t stabilise the ecosystem without a stable world population. A stable world population relies on lower birth rates. People only cut the number of children they have when a) their standard of living is high enough that they can guarantee their children will survive childhood and prosper (hence the vital need to roll out better technology quickly) b) women have a chance at a a career other than child rearing and c) effective contraception is readily available. This means increases in foreign aid that are gender aware and aren’t driven by religious ideology about sex.
There are lots of reports that say that China and India can get a huge reduction in CO2 and increase in energy efficiency just by using the technology they have more effectively. e.g. here: http://tinyurl.com/5jsht5. This is an improvement that could be made almost overnight. If Hansen is right that the tipping point is within the next few years, what is the point of trying to build and roll out a brand new nuclear tech-tree, even if it is now theoretically cheap and safe? It will still take years and years!

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Hansen writes on page 4 (the sole mention of conservation):

Economic incentives for utilities must be changed so that profits increase with increased energy conservation, not in proportion to amount of energy sold.

Then on page 5 he writes:

There also must be better efficiency standards in building codes, for vehicles, and in appliances and electronics. Profit incentives for utilities must be changed, so as to encourage efficiency as opposed to selling as much energy as possible.

This seems confused at best as regards conservation.

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WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM BELL LABS ABOUT MANAGING ENERGY R&D? HOW IS IT DIFFERENT NOW? HOW ABOUT ENERGY R&D?

BELL LABS,ONCE UPON A TIME
Once upon a time, Bell Laboratories employed about 25,000 people in R&D, and was usually considered the premier industrial R&D lab in the world, for many decades. To be a Member of Technical Staff, one needed an M.S. or PhD. It was part of the Bell System, about which one can say “monopoly money is really nice.”

From its creation in 1925 onwards, Bell Labs generated:

– a few Nobel prizes
– numerous important breakthroughs
– a truly huge number of incremental improvements

See Bell Labs History, and see their pick of top 10 innovations. Modern technology has many other contributors, but an amazing amount of modern computing and communications technologies has some heritage somewhere in Bell Labs’ patents, software, or mathematics.

For example, if you use UNIX, Linux, MacOS, or even Windows, you use some features that originated in UNIX in the 1970s, and if you use the Internet, your packets are being handled by CPUs designed more for C than anything else.

I worked there from 1973-1983, fortunately mostly within excellent management chains and for many outstanding managers, including one who became CTO of Bell Labs and another who became President. Bell Labs generated many breakthroughs, BUT:

These managers always said:

“Never schedule breakthroughs.”

Why would they say that? And if great managers at a premier R&D lab didn’t think they could do it, should that be a caution?

R&D PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT & PROGRESSIVE COMMITMENT
Consider normal good R&D portfolio management, as practiced by companies and governments capable of long-term thinking, and who understand technology diffusion and inertia of huge installed bases.

Our classification was more-or-less as follows, although different people use different labels, and in some places, combine R2+D1, or D1+D2, or R2+D1+D2
I’ve never managed R1, have done/managed the rest:

Pure Research (R1) many little projects, modest $
Applied Research (R2)
Exploratory Development (D1)
Advanced Development (D2)
Development (D3) might include pilot plants, beta tests, etc.
Deployment & scaleup, cost reductions, etc. (D4) $$$$$$

The typical methodology is:

a) Spend a big chunk of $$ on deployment of what works already, knowing that volume & experience will help costs come down, and of course, in the energy case, there are plenty of efficiencies around that are zero-cost, although they may require upfront capital.

b) Meanwhile, spend some money on lots of little Research projects, select ones that have promise and take them further. This is usually called “progressive commitment”, i.e., you normally have lots of little R projects, and fewer, but bigger D projects, and then most of the money gets spent in deployment and scaleup of something you know works and can be scaled.

This avoids the common “MIT graduate student syndrome”:

Q: What can you build with 6 MIT PhD students?

A: Anything! ….
But you might only be able to build one of it…

c) One needs competent management of this process.

At Bell Labs, real R was only about 7%. Of course, that was tiny compared to the 100s of thousands of people involved in manufacturing, deployment, and support, and even small compared to the bulk of people doing Development.

The Bell System had more than 1M employees at that point, and really did think in terms of decades, which many businesses do not. The telephone network had some similarities with the power grid. Tiny efficiencies mattered. I recall a guy getting an award for saving a tiny fraction of the amount of gold needed for electrical contacts … but that was $Ms/year savings.]

Given the scale (in the old Bell System days), we had to install things that worked, not counting on what our R folks might invent. We knew they’d invent interesting things, but we also knew it might be *20 years* before we could really use them, and some things (like bubble memories) worked, but never well enough to win.

Some things were deemed interesting, but really niche, when first done … like lasers, or solar cells. Of course, while lasers have many surprise uses, one of the most importnat is running the fibreoptic links that carry most of the world’s communications traffic.

I know of two $B projects where they charged into fullscale Development too early, and wasted most of that money.

But, breakthroughs aren’t just accidents (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swans to the contrary – his books have much merit, but when he gets into R&D management, I think he’s out of his turf, and he certainly says some wrong things about specific people I know well.)

If you want to get things to happen, you set up disciplined R&D programs that allow for the somewhat chaotic nature of real R1. Bell Labs invested in the smartest people we could hire, supported them superbly, picked people working in areas likely to be relevant, gave them long term timeframes, and had management support for capitalizing on their findings and diffusing technology appropriately and *commercially*.

[That was one of my explicit assignments for years: keep in touch with researchers, see if they’d invented anything that could be further productized, and mention real problems to them in the hopes that they might get interested. Sometimes they did.]

Note that this is different from building things (like the Manhattan Project] where cost is essentially no object. One may note that even in the USA, many military projects that once seemed budget-unlimited turned as much as they could to COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf) rather than hand-built-specials.

NOW? GOVERNMENT, UNIVERSITIES, VCs.
THESE DAYS, Bell Labs is a much smaller place, XEROX PARC isn’t what it was, and in general, large industrial R&D is less prevalent. Government R&D labs range from superb to rather slow, and sometimes cost-insensitive. DARPA did some awesomely good project management.

In the USA, most R (R1 + R2) is done at universities, with government and/or industrial funding. Places like Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc, etc have serious efforts in many areas of energy R&D. See the GCEP program for example.

a) One needs the right project managers in government.

b) Good R&D must happen in universities and elsewhere.

c) then, it has to get commercialized, which may happen through existing companies or maybe startups. I work with VCs. They don’t fund R, at least not on purpose :-). They love D3 and D4, although they might fund D2 if they must, to get in early.

d) Government doesn’t simulate VCs very well, with rare exceptions. I’ve had to tell a number of government people that, and they never like to hear it. Government must fund basic research, pass the right rules, encourage entrepreneurs, make it easy to start and stop businesses, offer sensible consistency for long-term investments, etc.

Government’s role seems mainly in funding R1+R2, and enabling D4, and sometimes helping D3 with purchasing power. But in picking the potential winners in the middle, it is rare to find the right skill-set in government.

ENERGY R&D

I’ll happily listen to people advocating massive R&D for energy projects, IF:

1) They explain the starting portfolio, including what stage each of the proposed projects is at, any known barriers, risks, scaleup issues, costs, etc. [Obviously more is known on some project that’s further along.]

Even while being a techno-optimist living in the very heart of techno-optimism, I tend to want to be careful about new ideas, because simple descriptions don’t really explain how far along such things really are.

2) They explain the R&D portfolio management strategy and who’s going to run it.

Energy stuff is *harder* than what we did at BTL, since Laws of Thermodynamics != Moore’s Law.
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Anyway, whenever anyone says “R&D” or Research I try to ask them what they mean by that, because different people mean very, very different things. Just throwing money at the problem is *not* a good idea, without good management of the process.

Hence:
4th generation nuclear may be a good idea, especially if it can burn up the radioactive junk that’s around. By law in CA, there will be no new nuclear reactors until the disposal problem is solved, and the history is not encouraging so far. But, I sure hope there’s a disciplined R&D plan that could yield at most a few standardized designs to replicate. However, we certainly can’t wait for it, although good nuclear plants do have the great advantage of being concentrated, in the same way coal/gas plants are, but unlike wind-turbines, so they can re-use existing grid layouts easily. Of course, the nice thing about wind turbines and CSP is that the technical risk is ~zero.

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Regarding IFRs and such, there’s a Wikipedia page, and I recommend the comments from Steve Kirsch, who is a smart guy locally. [I got to drive an EV-1 once at his house.]

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The 1-2 punch of a carbon tax and nuclear power would be very effective. For a glimpse of the potential, have a look at this interactive map from the University of Texas.

http://calculators.energy.utexas.edu/lcoe_map/#/county/tech

For setup, click on the box for “Include externalities” near the top, and on the “+” to the right of the blue box (nuclear).

Try lowering the CO2 price to a more reasonable 35 $/tCO2. And drop the overnight cost of nuclear to $4. (This input is finicky–just delete the 8 and type in 4.) Several SMRs anticipate an overnight cost well below this figure.

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Time once again to dust off Dr. Hansen’s letter and give it to a new US president. It’s still relevant.

Chapter 44 from Dr. Hansen’s upcoming book Sophie’s Planet covers the time when this letter was written, providing some very useful background material.

The previous chapter had described a mini workshop entitled “Climate and Energy”, held in Washington, DC on Nov. 3, 2008, one day before Barak Obama was elected. The workshop had five priority topics: energy efficiency, renewables, grid improvement, advanced nuclear, and carbon capture.

On page 2 of Chapter 44, Hansen continues: “Two major policy implications emerged from the five workshop topics. First, we need a continually rising price on carbon emissions. A carbon price drives all five workshop goals – from energy efficiency through carbon capture – and it does so by letting the market set priorities and investments, which is economically effective. Second, the government needs to provide strong RD&D (research, development and demonstration) support of modern nuclear power.”

These two policies, I take it, should still be the top climate priorities for the US.

Click to access Planet.Chapter44.pdf

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