News & Views item - April 2011

 

Marty Hoffert and Clean Energy. (April 20, 2011)

Marty Hoffert is professor emeritus of physics at New York University. The April 14, 2011 issue of Nature features an opinion piece by him which cites history to those spooked by sovereign debt and in a panic to return the government to surplus in the shortest possible time.

Excerpts:

Some assert that government investment in transformative energy technology is code for tax and spend, and that suitable technologies already exist, or will be delivered by market forces. Others argue that government incentives such as feed-in tariffs for solar and wind energy are unnecessary, and that clean energy should compete in the market from the beginning. But the idea that private-sector entrepreneurship can do the job alone is based on a myth. It took 30 years of government funding of the Internet by the military research agency DARPA and the National Science Foundation before Wall Street discovered that there was money to be made out of it.

 

The private-sector-alone approach is a prescription for disaster...

 

Today, a poster child for carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes is carbon dioxide collection at the Dakota Gasification Company's plant in Beulah, North Dakota... It would not have happened without massive government underwriting of the risk.

 

US debt now is a comparable per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to what it was in the Great Depression before the Second World War.

 

By massively borrowing from ourselves to finance President Franklin D. Roosevelt's miracles of war production and technology development... even as the US debt-to-GDP ratio increased to more than 100% by the end of the war. We bet the farm on a stimulus package on steroids — and we won. The United States emerged as the strongest economy on the planet.

 

One can only hope that we're not so distracted by ideological battles about government versus private-sector funding that the real energy and global-change problems defeat us because of a failure of imagination.

 

Professor Hoffert then pleads:

 

Mr President and Congress: open your minds to a civilization powered by wind turbines in harmony with our landscape and continental shelves; solar electricity from deserts and Earth orbit powering our cites; safe, proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors; coal gasifiers driving efficient electric power plants with CO2 stored underground; along with energy-efficient homes and public buildings, smart power grids, high-speed rail, electric and biofuelled cars, even carbon-neutral fuels made from sunlight, water and CO2 in the atmosphere more efficiently than nature does by photosynthesis. These are no longer impossible dreams, but realities of new US industries revitalized by American entrepreneurs and a high-tech workforce, much like the one Roosevelt created to fight the Second World War.