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Clean Tech Headed for Stagnation
To be sure, the U.S. clean energy industry has been in a period of rapid growth, largely due to historic federal investments in the research, development, deployment, and manufacture of clean technologies. From 2009 through 2014, the federal...
A Story about Energy Innovation Policy: Envia Systems
Since the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, emerging next-generation electric vehicle battery company Envia has been gaining headlines because its technology holds the promise of much cheaper electric cars within a few years. Yet a recent story...
Myhrvold: We Need to Invent New Energy Technologies
Previously, I wrote about a new study from top U.S. climate scientist Ken Caldeira and leading tech guru Nathan Myhrvold. The study’s modeling results show how monumentally difficult it will be to limit global temperature increase because of...
ARPA-E Summit 2012: Spurring Energy Innovation through the Tax Code
Today marks the end of the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, wrapping up a 3-day collection of America’s best, brightest, and most innovative clean energy thinkers and companies. The discussions varied, but the underlying theme was...
Dispatch from the ARPA-E Summit 2012: Scared off by Failure?
The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit is a wonderful collection of thinkers, policymakers, and industry leaders all focused on accelerating and spurring clean energy innovation. At the very least, we’re all trying to fundamentally change the U.S...
The Smart Energy Act of 2012
The next ten and half months hold little promise of Congress producing a coherent national clean energy strategy. The same legislative gridlock over the federal budget that stalled debate on key issues last year looks to come back in...
Is Economic Contraction a Climate Solution ?
It is time to take stock of our current climate trajectory, and consider what it means for climate policy. In Part 1 of this week long series, we argued that our current climate trajectory means we must 1) redouble efforts to reduce CO2...
The Future of Global Climate Policy: Taking Stock of Our Climate Outlook (Part 1)
Significantly limiting humanity’s impact on the global climate is quite simply an enormous task. Unfortunately, thanks to budget austerity and federal gridlock, any hope of implementing sweeping U.S. climate/energy policy has been...
What Role Should the State's Play in Boosting the Clean Economy?
In a new report released today, Lew Milford, President of the Clean Energy Group and Mark Muro, Policy Director at the Brookings Metropolitan Program discuss an underreported, but key state clean energy policy – public clean energy investment...
2012 Federal Budget Halts Further Cuts to Energy Innovation
The FY2012 Omnibus Appropriations bill, passed through the House and Senate conference committee last week, provides a small 2.5 percent increase in DOE energy innovation investment-related Offices and programs compared to FY2011. The budget...
Let’s Shelve the Small Talk: Boost Energy Innovation to Reduce America’s 3 Deficits
Robert Solow, Nobel laureate and father of neoclassical economic growth theory, says that policymakers’ current economic solutions are nothing more than “drivel” and that spurring innovation – especially energy innovation – must be a central...
Salvaging Durban with Innovation
Looking past the possibility of any legally-binding global emission target (and U.S. involvement in any treaty), the international climate negotiations opening today in Durban, South Africa are missing the point – the only way the world is...
