I am not a huge fan of the Sputnik Moment / Win the Future / Sky Is Falling rhetoric that President Obama invoked in his State of the Union and that his team have been using to sell their clean energy strategy. But I’m also growing weary of reading contrary economic analyses that seem to believe that economic policy is all about win-wins and kumbaya. Read more »

Last night, I posted some preliminary analysis on the new Obama goal of 80% clean electricity by 2035. Like most other observers, I assumed, based on the President’s rhetoric and the language in the available White House fact sheets, that the target included renewables, nuclear, and natural gas. Read more »

The New York Times “Room for Debate” asked seven smart experts whether the United States can compete with China on green technology. Their responses, published yesterday, are well worth reading. I worry, though, that they reflect a peculiar, and increasingly unproductive, debate. Read more »

Keith Bradsher reports in yesterday’s New York Times that Congress is forcing the Defense Department to forego purchases of Chinese solar panels. My initial instinct was to scream “Protectionism!” – but there’s actually a strong case for what Congress is doing. Read more »

Now that Cancun is done, it’s time to start thinking hard again about the nitty-gritty of low-carbon development. Harvard’s Energy Technology Innovation Program (ETIP) has a big new report (along with a shorter policy brief) on government investment in energy RD&D in what they call “the BRIMCS”: Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, China, and South Africa. The report’s headline is that government investment is greater in the BRIMCS than in the OECD. My preliminary read of the report is that the most interesting stuff is elsewhere. Read more »

Shifting the focus of climate policy to investment in energy innovation has long been touted as a way to cut through international bickering over who should shoulder the cost of cutting emissions. Recent squabbling between the United States and China over whether Chinese government support for clean energy technology violates trade rules, though, should wake us up to the fact that life is not so simple. Read more »

The new Brookings/AEI/Breakthrough “Post-Partisan Power” study, which calls on policymakers to focus on energy innovation rather than carbon pricing, has been generating a lot of debate over the last day. I symphathize with those who have criticized the study for pretending to be more “bipartisan” than it actually is, and for overselling the potential of energy innovation absent government incentives that increase demand. But set that aside: what’s being missed in this debate is that most of the paper is actually a smart and thoughtful discussion of how to do energy innovation policy right. Read more »

David Leonhardt has a column in today’s New York Times which looks at at the potential for government-sponsored innovation to drive U.S. climate policy. I’m sympathetic to the argument that carbon pricing (and other demand-side policy) isn’t enough alone to transform how we produce and consume energy. But Leonhardt indulges in some bad logic that’s common enough to deserve rebutting: Read more »

I wrote last week about how Chinese gains in solar energy could help, rather than hurt, U.S. businesses. My argument was that if China focused on those parts of the value chain where it had a natural edge, and the United States focused on those parts where it was most suited, they could together bring down the cost of solar. That would increase the market for solar, and they would both win. In particular, I argued that Chinese strength in the later stages of solar manufacturing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Read more »