Innovation AND Insulation
February 08, 2010 07:47AM
Bill Gates launched his Gates Notes blog and podcast with a well-intentioned call for energy innovation ("Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation"). His appeal was picked up by Brookings fellow Mark Muro at The New Republic, who pointed to a proposal for energy discovery-innovation institutes (e-DIIs).
From Brookings:
The federal government should create a national network of several dozen e-DIIs. An interagency process should establish the network and competitively award core federal support of up to $200 million per year for each major e-DII operated by university or national laboratory consortia, along with funding for smaller e-DIIs and distributed energy networks connected to the large e-DII “hubs.”
Certainly, a more pressing R&D priority than clean energy hardly exists, but Gates flubbed by pitting energy innovation against energy efficiency (insulation). Computer scientist Steve Easterbrook illustrates the strategic relationship between the two in this graph.
In "Bill Gates is very wrong," Easterbrook explains:
The key problem in climate change is not the actual emissions in any given year. It’s the cumulative emissions over time. The carbon we emit by burning fossil fuels doesn’t magically disappear. ... For every additional year that we fail to get emissions under control we compound the problem. ...
The graph shows three different scenarios, each with the same cumulative emissions (i.e. the area under each curve is the same). If we get emissions to peak next year (the green line), it’s a lot easier to keep cumulative emissions under control. If we delay, and allow emissions to continue to rise until 2020, then we can forget about 80% reductions by 2050. We’ll have set ourselves the much tougher task of 100% emissions reductions by 2040!
