John P. Holdren
Energy for Change
Introduction to the Special Issue on
Energy & Climate
Without energy, there is no economy. Without climate, there is no environment.
Without economy and environment, there is no material well-being, no civil soci-
ety, no personal or national security. The overriding problem associated with these
realities, of course, is that the world has long been getting most of the energy its
economies need from fossil fuels whose emissions are imperiling the climate that
its environment needs.
Compounding that predicament are emissions from land-use change—above
all, deforestation in the developing countries of the tropics. Like society’s choices
about energy supply and use, this process has been driven by powerful economic
and political forces insufficiently moderated by understanding or consideration of
the environmental component of societal well-being.
This is no longer a hypothetical or distant issue. It is real and it is upon us. The
climate is changing markedly nearly everywhere. The air and the oceans are warm-
ing, mountain glaciers are disappearing, permafrost is thawing, sea ice is shrink-
ing, the great land ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are slipping, and sea
level is rising. And the consequences for human well-being are already being felt:
more heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires; tropical diseases reaching into the
temperate zones; vast areas of forest being destroyed by pest outbreaks linked to
warming; hurricanes and typhoons of greater power; and coastal property increas-
ingly at risk from the surging seas.
All this is happening faster than was expected. Sea level is rising at twice the
average rate for the 20th century. The volume of sea ice in the Arctic (its area times
its average thickness), which reaches a seasonal minimum every September,
appears to have been smaller in September 2008 than in any year of the last 30—
John P. Holdren is Assistant to the President of the United States for Science and
Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Prior to joining the Obama administration, he was a professor at Harvard in both the
Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and Co-Chair of the National
Commission on Energy Policy.
© 2009 John P. Holdren
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John P. Holdren
the period in which we’ve been able to estimate this variable. In that same 30 years,
the average area annually burned by wildfires in the western United States has
quadrupled.
Nor is the primary cause of these changes any longer in serious doubt. The pri-
mary cause is the emission of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants
from our factories, homes, offices, vehicles, and power plants, and from land clear-
ing. We also know that failure to curb these emissions will bring far bigger impacts
from global climate
change than those expe-
rienced so far. Drastic
changes in weather pat-
terns, sharp drops in the
productivity of
farms
and ocean fisheries, a
dramatic acceleration of
species extinctions, and
inundation of low-lying
areas by rising sea level
are among the possible
outcomes.
Without energy, there is no
economy. Without climate, there is
no environment. Without economy
and environment, there is no
material well-being, no civil society,
no personal or national security.
The overriding problem associated
with these realities, of course, is
that the world has long been
getting most of the energy its
economies need from fossil fuels
whose emissions are imperiling the
climate that its environment needs.
But we also know
what we can and must
do to avoid the worst of
these possibilities. We
must work together—
East and West and
North and South—to
transform our
tech-
nologies for supplying
and using energy from
polluting and wasteful
to clean and efficient.
We must create new incentives and agreements to accelerate this transformation,
and to bring deforestation and other destructive land-use practices to a halt
around the world. And we must invest in adaptation efforts to reduce our vulner-
ability to the degree of climate change that can no longer be avoided.
We can do this together. And when we do, we will benefit not only by avoiding
the worst damage from climate change, but also by reducing our perilous overde-
pendence on petroleum, alleviating the air pollution that afflicts our cities, pre-
serving our forests as havens for biodiversity and sources of sustainable liveli-
hoods, and unleashing a new wave of technological innovation—generating new
businesses, new jobs, and new growth in the course of creating the clean and effi-
cient energy systems of the future.
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Energy for Change: Introduction to the Energy & Climate Special Issue
The key question we now need to heed about what the science of climate
change is telling us is how much progress we need to make with these measures,
and how quickly, to have a good chance of avoiding climate changes more extreme
than our adaptation efforts will be able to manage. And the science is increasingly
clear in pointing to the conclusion that it will be essential to hold the global aver-
age temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius if we are to keep cli-
mate change to a manageable level.
It is likewise clear that if we are to have a good chance of meeting this goal,
global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants must level
off by about 2020 and decline thereafter to something like 50 percent of the cur-
rent levels by 2050, with continuing declines after that. Allowing for the larger his-
torical responsibility and much higher current per capita emissions of the indus-
trialized countries and for the development trajectories and aspirations of the
developing ones, the most likely way to achieve this goal would be for the indus-
trialized world to level off its emissions by 2015 and reduce them thereafter to
around 20 percent of current levels by 2050, with the developing countries follow-
ing after a lag of about a decade, leveling off their emissions by about 2025 and
reducing them after that.
These are targets that we can meet. As the content of this special issue of
Innovations illustrates, the solutions to our climate challenge aren’t just “out there,”
they are right here—before your eyes, in your hands. Climate solutions are in
California, which thirty years ago charted a course toward energy efficiency that
other states are only now beginning to follow. They are in Brazil, which generates
50% of the fuel used in its cars from home-grown sugarcane. They are in New
Hampshire, where a company started by a former nuclear engineer is working to
develop the carbon capture and storage technologies that will be essential for a
cleaner coal future. They are in Hawaii, where plug-in electric vehicles are quietly
becoming a reality. And they are in Arkansas, where the world’s biggest company—
Walmart—is establishing standards for energy use and carbon reductions that will
apply not only to its global operations but to its entire supply chain.
These and the other innovations described in this special issue are not isolated
anecdotes. Nor are they elements of any single grand plan. They are simply a few
of the many pathways to progress created every day by citizens, by the businesses
that serve them, and by the governments that represent them. Such pathways
derive from another other type of energy vital to addressing our climate chal-
lenges: the creative energy of people who, through ingenuity, partnerships, and
collaborations, are able to cut through complexity to arrive at practical solutions.
We can ask for no better guides than they to lead us toward the prosperous and
secure future to which we all aspire.
CONTENTS OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE
The publication before you is as thorough a survey of energy and climate solutions
as has yet been compiled. Like other issues of Innovations, it is organized into four
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John P. Holdren
sections: lead essays; cases authored by innovators (each accompanied by a com-
mentary); integrative analytic papers; and perspectives on policy.
Lead Essays
The lead essays are authored by a formidable group of energy and climate policy
veterans.
First among them is Thomas Schelling, recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Economics in 2005 (jointly with Robert Aumann) and chair of the first committee
of the National Academy of Sciences to study global warming. Schelling makes a
compelling case for a new institutional architecture to support international col-
laboration to address the climate challenge. Specifically, Schelling points out that
the countries most likely to suffer adverse impacts from climate change are also, in
most cases, the ones least well equipped to adapt their energy infrastructures to
reduce carbon emissions. Advanced industrialized countries have an opportunity
to reduce adverse impacts from climate change while improving welfare for the
majority of the world’s population by both increasing and better structuring ener-
gy and climate assistance to developing countries.
The second lead essay is authored by Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun
Microsystems, a general partner at the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, and the founder of Khosla Ventures, a major investor in energy
technologies. Khosla applies the deal-making acuity that has made him one of
America’s most successful private-equity investors to the task of proposing a way
forward with climate negotiations that would be acceptable to both developed and
developing countries. Khosla makes the case that even when countries agree on the
urgency of the climate challenge and on the most efficient mechanisms to achieve
needed carbon reductions, potentially deal-breaking disagreements may exist
about the fairness of different approaches for defining and sharing responsibility.
He proposes an approach aimed at aligning the objectives of carbon reduction and
economic growth, while at the same time allocating responsibility for progress in
an equitable manner.
The third lead essay is by Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center.
Focusing on policy at the national level in the United States, Claussen emphasizes
the benefits to business of policy certainty during the transition to a lower-carbon
economy. She quotes George Nolen, president and CEO of Siemens Corporation:
“Businesses need to plan. The absence of a price signal for carbon in the U.S. sti-
fles planning and creates a competitive barrier to investment in technology.”
Creating a price signal for carbon, she argues, is a prerequisite if the U.S. is to real-
ize the job creation and growth gains that will accompany the shift toward clean
technologies.
The fourth lead essay is written by Bill Drayton, founder and chairman of both
Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and of Get America Working. Drayton is today
best known as a leading figure in the field of social entrepreneurship. Three
decades ago, however, Drayton made another contribution directly relevant to the
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Energy for Change: Introduction to the Energy & Climate Special Issue
theme of this volume. At the Environmental Protection Agency, he set up the
world’s first system for emissions trading. Others had floated the idea, but Drayton
took the lead in implementing it. Today, the same principle of emissions trading
has been accepted throughout the world as the best approach for achieving target-
ed reductions in emissions while maximizing economic efficiency. Like Claussen,
Drayton emphasizes the need to get prices right. He focuses on the tax system,
arguing that it makes no sense to subsidize the use of machines by keeping energy
prices low while penalizing the use of labor through payroll taxes. Urging structur-
al changes in the economy to “favor people, not things,” he advances a proposal to
both create jobs and meet climate goals by reducing the tax on employment and
increasing the tax on gasoline.
Cases Authored by Innovators
The second section of this issue features four cases authored by innovators. Each
of these addresses a different domain of energy and climate solutions. The first two
describe initiatives spanning decades that have had large-scale impacts in
California and Brazil, respectively. The second two describe new ventures that hold
promise for the future.
The first case narrative is by Arthur Rosenfeld, a pioneer in the design and
implementation of policies to encourage energy efficiency whose “laboratory” for
this work has been the State of California. (That per capita electricity demand
stayed constant in California over the past three decades while rising 50 percent in
the rest of the United States is widely known as “the Rosenfeld effect”.) In a fasci-
nating retrospective, Rosenfeld describes how energy efficiency was first “invent-
ed” as a concept relevant to public policy and then embedded into a set of strate-
gies for dramatically shifting the trendline of energy consumption in the nation’s
largest state—still perhaps the greatest success story during the past 30 years of
U.S. energy policy.
The discussion of the California experience in achieving efficiency gains is
written by Ralph Cavanagh, Energy Program co-director at the Natural Resources
Defense Council. Cavanagh starts with a wonderful anecdote: “Late in 2006, soon
after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California’s path-breaking
curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, a reporter asked California Energy
Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld when statewide reductions would start showing
up. ‘Around 1975,’ he replied.” The point is clear: future carbon reductions in
California—and, Cavanagh, argues, elsewhere in the U.S.—are not only possible,
they are to be expected as a direct extension of past successes. Other regions and
countries can achieve substantial carbon reductions with a minimum of creativity
or risk-taking simply by following the strategies—such as electricity and natural
gas rate “decoupling”—employed successfully in California.
The second case narrative in the issue is by José Goldemberg, a professor at the
University of São Paulo who has held many positions of national and internation-
al distinction over the span of his 50-year career as a scientist and public servant.
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John P. Holdren
He is among the world’s most respected voices on energy policy. Goldemberg’s case
narrative describes the origins and evolution of Brazil’s world-leading biofuels
program, of which he was among the principal architects. Placing Brazil’s experi-
ence in a global context, Goldemberg describes the potential that exists for Brazil
and other developing countries to create jobs and contribute to meeting carbon
targets by producing ethanol for export.
Melinda Kimble, a senior vice president at the U.N. Foundation, offers a dis-
the Goldemberg case. Kimble, who oversees the foundation’s
cussion of
International Biotechnology Initiative and who previously served as an Assistant
Secretary of State, emphasizes how Brazil’s success in shifting its energy mix
derived from its creativity in finding multiple uses for sugarcane and its by-prod-
ucts. The central lessons to be learned from Brazil’s experience, according to
Kimble, pertain not to ethanol itself, but rather to the value that can be created by
policies encouraging market flexibility and resource optimization.
The next case narrative tells the story of a new company with a big vision—
Better Place, which seeks to make electric vehicles a wide-spread reality. As
described in this narrative by the company’s founder, Shai Agassi, Better Place has
undertaken new approaches to developing and deploying electric-vehicle driver
services, systems, and infrastructure. In the Better Place models, subscribers and
guest users have access to a network of charge spots, switch stations, and systems
that substantially increase driver convenience while minimizing environmental
impact and cost.
Daniel Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy
Laboratory at the of the University of California-Berkeley and the co-director of
the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, offers a discussion of Agassi’s case.
Kammen begins by pointing to the regrettable failure in the U.S. to make headway
on vehicle efficiency for a period of two decades, from the mid-1980s to roughly
2005. Clearly, Kammen points out, the time has come to get the ball rolling again.
The question is, along what path? Kammen summarizes the alternatives. He then
encapsulates the challenge that Agassi and his team at Better Place face in bringing
about the system change required so that electric vehicles are competitive not only
with today’s conventional vehicles, but also with the improved internal combus-
tion engines and hybrid-electric cars that are on the horizon.
The final case narrative is the story of Powerspan, a company that develops and
sells carbon capture technologies. The company’s founder and the author of the
case, Frank Alix, describes with clarity both why carbon capture and storage (CSS)
technologies are of potentially great importance in meeting carbon-reduction tar-
gets and how the development and widespread deployment of CSS technologies
represent a complex business challenge. At the same time that he describes a sig-
nificant climate solution, Alix also offers a compelling entrepreneurial narrative.
Here is a man who, trained as a nuclear engineer and about to embark on a career
building submarines for the Navy, is faced with the end of the Cold War and a sud-
den, wholly unexpected decrease in his professional prospects. Looking for new
opportunities, Alix eventually rededicated himself to a new challenge vital to
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Energy for Change: Introduction to the Energy & Climate Special Issue
national security: the reduction of carbon emissions from coal-powered energy
plants. The result, after over a decade of entrepreneurial perseverance, is the com-
pany that today is Powerspan.
The discussion of the Powerspan case is authored by Granger Morgan who
leads the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon
University and is one of our country’s most thoughtful experts on energy policy.
Morgan offers a concise and lucid exposition of the challenges that must be over-
come before CSS technologies can contribute significantly to meeting the climate
challenge. Observing correctly that the very existence of markets for environmen-
tal-control technologies is predicated upon regulatory action, Morgan summarizes
the dimensions of public action required before the potential benefits of CSS tech-
nologies can be realized. He concludes that “while technical innovation will be a
critical part of the successful large-scale deployment of CCS, innovation in public
policy and law will likely be as or more important.”
Analytic Essays
The case narratives in the issue cover four areas of potentially great significance to
creating climate solutions: improving energy efficiency, creating substitutes for oil,
enabling coal to be burned more cleanly, and developing the infrastructure to
make electric vehicles a reality. The analytic essays address two more: creating the
safeguards and building the institutional capacity to enable a next generation of
nuclear power, and combining standards and innovation to dramatically improve
the efficiency of energy use in buildings.
The future of nuclear power is the subject of a set of four essays respectively
authored by Matthew Bunn and Martin Malin of Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government; Tariq Rauf and Zoryana Vovchok of the International Atomic Energy
Agency; Roger Howsley, former director of Security, Safeguards and International
Affairs (SSIA) for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.; and Charles McCombie, formerly sci-
entific and technical director of Nagra, the Swiss Cooperative for the Disposal of
Radioactive Waste. The authors of these essays are professionals with nearly a cen-
tury of combined experience related to nuclear energy and security policy — peo-
ple who understand well the particular characteristics that make nuclear power
simultaneously one of humanity’s most promising and most contentious cre-
ations. As a large-scale energy-production technology that generates zero carbon
emissions in use, nuclear power is in the midst of a potentially welcome resur-
gence. The growth in the use of nuclear power and the contributions that such
growth could make to addressing the climate challenge are at risk of being cut
short, however, if accidental or deliberate catastrophes (e.g. another Chernobyl,
use of civil plutonium in a nuclear weapon that explodes in a city) cannot be
avoided. The nuclear industry and all of us share an interest in driving the risk of
such catastrophes as close to zero as possible. This collection of essays describes
improved nuclear safety, security, and nonproliferation controls—including new
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John P. Holdren
institutions and agreements—whose implementation could enable the nuclear
industry to grow responsibly and safely.
Multiple authors with deep experience in energy policy collaborated to pro-
duce a set of essays on strategies to improve efficiency in buildings—what my col-
league, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, has described as the “low-hanging fruit”
in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions both at home and abroad. Jim Turner,
former chief counsel for the Science Committee of
the U.S. House of
the
Representatives, has joined with Ellen Vaughan, policy director of
Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and Colin McCormick, an energy spe-
cialist with the Federation of American Scientists, in examining this claim by
showing the magnitude of possible savings from buildings, the current state of
energy efficiency knowledge and use in the United States, and the changes that
must occur before we can start realizing the large reductions in carbon emissions
that are possible through the more efficient use of energy in buildings. A second
essay, written by Henry Green, the president of the National Institute of Building
Sciences, describes how his organization is helping craft standards to enable a
future of high-performance buildings that are not only far more energy efficient
than today’s, but that also incorporate significant advances in safety, security, and
accessibility. In a third essay, Franz Beyeler, the chief executive officer of Minergie,
his colleague Nick Beglinger, and Ursina Roder of the Embassy of Switzerland to
the United States, describe Switzerland’s success in improving the energy efficien-
cy of the built environment through voluntary energy standards.
The last of the three analytic essays is authored by Hunter Lovins, the founder
of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and one of America’s most expressive voices on the
topic of benefits attainable through improved energy efficiency. Lovins provides a
systematic survey of initiatives that companies and municipalities have undertak-
en unilaterally to address the climate challenge. Along the way she describes what
she terms “the economic case for climate action.” Lovins notes that leading U.S.
companies including DuPont, G.E., Alcoa, Caterpillar, and PG&E, acting as mem-
bers of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, have called for national legislation to
cap carbon emissions, stating, “In our view, the climate change challenge will cre-
ate more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy.” Lovins further
describes how cities, states, campuses and others are implementing climate-protec-
tion efforts, and in so doing “cutting their costs, creating jobs, and enhancing their
economies by reducing their carbon footprint.”
Perspectives on Policy
In the final section of the energy and climate special issue, two pairs of authors take
a step back from specific innovations in practice to offer their perspectives on the
design and implementation of climate policies.
William Bonvillian of MIT and Charles Weiss of Georgetown University focus
on the challenge of undertaking large-scale innovation in energy and other estab-
lished sectors of the economy that are complex and capital intensive. The core
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Energy for Change: Introduction to the Energy & Climate Special Issue
metaphor of their essay is a colorful and illuminating one: Americans know well
how to bring real and metaphorical “covered wagons” West and build on frontiers
of various types; however we have less experience, and are arguably less adept, in
taking those same covered wagons East—that is, innovating in established techno-
logical and social domains. Our energy systems, like our healthcare systems, are
complex and interconnected. In such settings, success in addressing future chal-
lenges and realizing future opportunities may require a new innovation frame-
work—one vision of which is offered by the authors.
In a second perspective on policy, Daniel Kammen, introduced above, and
Felix Creutzig, a postdoctoral fellow and associate at the Technical University
Berlin, have coauthored an essay that emphasizes the need for adaptability in inter-
national accords to ensure that different geographical regions are able to realize
fully the societal benefits that they can derive from a transition away from carbon.
To exemplify the need for such an approach, the authors focus on two domains:
rural regions in Africa and cities in the industrialized world. The authors argue
that putting a future international climate accord into a local context and relating
mitigation measures to “co-benefits” of a carbon transition not only will increase
political acceptance of any accord reached but also will advance other important
sustainable development objectives.
CHANGE THAT SURROUNDS, CHANGES THAT PROPEL
The many impressive innovations and visionary ideas described in this volume are
all the more inspiring as one comes to understand that they are but a few of many.
Just as we are surrounded by evidence of a changing climate, so are we surround-
ed by climate solutions in the making. There was not room in this issue to come
close to covering them all, with wind, geothermal, advanced solar-electric tech-
nologies, the smart grid, direct solar-to-liquid-fuel conversion, better biofuel
options, new battery technologies, resource-conserving urban and transport-sys-
tem design, and advanced manufacturing technologies among the innovations get-
ting short shrift here.
Meeting the energy-climate challenge—supplying the expanded energy servic-
es required to create and sustain economic prosperity for everyone on the planet
without wrecking the global climate on which well-being equally depends—is like-
ly to be the toughest task that science, technology, and innovation policy will face
in this century. But I have no doubt that with education about the stakes and
opportunities, the political will created thereby, and the ingenuity and entrepre-
neurial spirit exemplified by the stories and ideas in this special issue of
Innovations, we will find that “Yes, we can.”
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