Here’s a valuable reaction to my piece on the energy and climate challenge and exploration of why the United States is having particular difficulty in finding traction. It’s provided by Lee Schipper, a longtime student of energy efficiency and transportation with positions at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Schipper says an innovation push is required, but there is also vital need to raise the cost of wasteful and polluting energy habits:  I find it easy to agree with Richard Somerville. If we continue to wait until we have a climate crisis, it’s too late. But the U.S. is in political crisis over what to do about energy and climate, and has been since the early 1970s. This country did not agree on how to value or price its concerns about oil imports (others taxed oil), whether or not one should move away from oil (others taxed all fuels), and more recently about CO2 (the brave Nordic countries have CO2 taxes). We fought for two decades over whether to strengthen fuel economy standards.  All the while research on energy uses and efficiency continued and efficiency of industrial processes, home heating, water heating, appliances, lighting, etc., improved, prodded in the case of household uses by thoughtful efficiency standards.  Cars got more efficient, too. The average new car today can move twice as many ton-miles of car on a gallon of fuel as a new car in 1980. But because tons and power increased so much, the average new car sold in 2009 used only 10 to 15 percent less fuel per kilometer than one sold in 1990, when the present fuel economy standards maxed out. [More on this phenomenon can be found in an article on the power imperative in car performance by Matt Wald.]  And many ways of saving energy in cars were eaten up as ways to provide more power at constant real fuel economy, rather than save fuel at constant power. Why? Real fuel prices fell to their bottom in the late 1990s, and only when they started upwards in 2003 did consumers begin to buy more efficient cars than the old standards required. Boosting of the standards on light trucks and SUVs helped, too, but that improvement was only 7.5 percent, versus a nearly 15 percent improvement in the test fuel economy of cars bought.  So everyone has great ways to save energy and reduce CO2, but market signals — and a strong right wing — say otherwise.  Today at Stanford we showed some of what R and D has given — a wide variety of electric cars, plug in hybrids, and fuel cell vehicles, as well as electric bikes, and niche electric cars like the Tesla, three wheelers, and even Stanford’s solar car that sails across the desert. At a pre-seminar I held, the auto makers big and small (Pi mobility (e-bikes), Honda, Toyota, VW, and Tesla) were asked what would make their products sell better. [Here's a TV report on the car event.]  Higher fuel prices was a common answer; we can’t keep making fuel and transport cheaper, not only because we have run out of money but because that just raises the demand for power and weight.  So I would submit that while we need lots of government research, we need a great sucking sound of people — families, builders, industries — investing in saving fuel and reducing their CO2 emissions drastically. As one of my students said, these vehicles are 20, 30, or 40 percent reductions in CO2 when 80 percent is closer to what is called for. We also have to change the way we move about.  But as long as both political parties promise cheap energy and tax breaks, we will just pile up idea after idea on the academic shelf but see little real change in the marketplace.  I’ll be adding more experts’ reactions to the initial energy-climate post here as they come in.  I also encourage you to read Paul Krugman’s piece laying out his proposed way forward on climate policy. It’s a great primer on the history of trying to bring environmental costs into economic reckoning. I see some holes in his prescription for climate action, one being his view that if Europe and the United States acted in concert, they could deploy stiff carbon tariffs to prod China on emissions if it refuses to be bound by a new treaty.  His reading of climate model projections also doesn’t mention the persistent uncertainty about how much warming a given rise in greenhouse gas concentrations could produce.  Finally, Krugman embraces the view that it is the uncertain, but plausible, worst case that justifies action on emissions — a view most fully articulated by the economist Martin Weitzman at Harvard. But he doesn’t mention that Weitzman has criticized the policy option favored by Krugman, a cap and trade mechanism for curbing emissions.  What’s your take on that piece and Schipper’s call for a price on waste? (I’ll be discussing climate and the energy quest on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC all month.)
An expert in energy and transportation says raising the cost of polluting transportation is vital to changing America's energy path.