2013-05-23T07:14:45-04:00 Mike Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=mike-brown Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mike Brown Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1819773 2012-08-23T17:40:47-04:00 2012-10-23T05:12:11-04:00

Mike Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-brown/ is a fiscal conservative. We also know he's a climate denier so the environmental community is going nuts... but I think they are out of sync. Paul Ryan is going to be their best friend. Maybe mine, too. I'm an investor in "clean" energy, as in anything that works to provide energy (or use energy) that reduces the impact of too much carbon.

Ryan is going to be our best buddy whether he knows it or not. In fact, as a clean energy investor, I think he improves the likelihood that those of us investing in a better future are going to see increased demand for the innovative technologies we've backed and the chance to make a whole lot of money in the process.

Now Ryan might not have figured this out. That's okay! In fact, I'm counting on it but then he will be thinking that guys like Richard Muller used to be his friend. However, Muller has done the unthinkable. As a well-known professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, once a spokesperson for the climate change "denier" community, he changed his mind. Paul Ryan, believe me, is NEVER going to change his mind that climate change is nonsense.

If he has his way, the U.S. will never become part of any international agreement on carbon. For him, fiscal conservation outdoes environmental conservation. So it's a really, really easy decision to stop the U.S. government from funding anything remotely connected to fixing the problem. Instead, Ryan's energy policy would see "drastic cuts in federal spending on energy research and development and for the outright elimination of subsidies and tax breaks for wind, solar power, and other alternative energy technologies." (Welcome back to the Dark Ages America.) Ryan won't answer whether he'll also cut subsidies to the traditional oil and gas industry, some of whom, like the Koch brothers, to no surprise, are huge campaign contributors.

Let's get to know the infamous Mr. Muller a bit more. As a former climate change "denier", he decided that he'd better be able to back up his claims with actual evidence that human activity was not causing whatever (small) changes in temperature were taking place. When he and others did the work, they first tracked real changes over the last 250 years and tried to blame those changes on many other non-human factors, but they couldn't. So Muller, a scientist, changed his mind based on science. Ryan, a non-scientist, will not change his mind, based on non-science. You can absolutely count on it. And Romney change his mind? Based on past... oh, surely not.

Another important person to mention is Anthony Leiserowitz. Leiserowitz heads the Yale Project on Climate Change, a project devoted to monitoring the public's knowledge on climate change. The other day, the group reported a poll which says by and large, voters approve candidates taking a pro-climate stance. He said that being pro-climate is not regarded as being negative, even among Republicans. That won't matter to Ryan, and when he gets into a debate (you can absolutely count on this too), what he says about this topic will count against him in the ranks of the independents. But, of course, Mr. Ryan already knows everything he needs to know on the subject.

Now why do I say Ryan is my "Clean Energy Buddy"? Let's go back to Muller. He might not sign on to everything that NASA's James Hansen has to say but according to Muller's own report, his "findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" and he "expects the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and half degrees over land in the next 50 years" unless China continues its rapid economic growth, bumping that up to 20 years. I've been saying for years that the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) is unstoppable by anything any of our politicians are going to do. Climate change is going to happen on a grand scale. Nice to have Dr. Muller on board.

So there are two possible outcomes: Ryan might help the Democrats win, and while President Obama won't start down the road of an effective carbon tax (nobody can), he is at least listening, and might well want to improve funding for alternative energy. He knows the Chinese see the industrial opportunity staring them in the face when it comes to developing and manufacturing the most advanced answers to minimize carbon emissions, so that's good.

If Romney and Ryan win, the big difference will be that they are personally incapable of changing their minds and recognizing reality. That means four years worth of further (and more powerful) evidence of global warming advancement through increased temperatures, continued drought, harsher storms, growing forest fires, flooding, and so on. They'll invent excuses, but government support for alternatives will be stopped in its tracks, maybe under the umbrella of maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy -- the wealthy, who by the way, probably figure they can just spend more and remain unaffected by the chaos around them. Some of this will hit people in their pocketbooks (e.g. food prices) but for four years the U.S. Government will ignore all of this. They'll also ignore Chinese technological progress.

While the Koch brothers might not like it, the industry will be watching and they too will know that the U.S. will eventually have to react. And if Dr. Muller is right: that reaction will be immense. This is when investors like me and my colleagues at Chrysalix who choose to fund groundbreaking and effective clean energy technology innovations will be presented with big cheques. So Paul Ryan, thank you very much for being my "buddy!

Mike Brown is Chairman of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, 40-year venture veteran, and winner of the Cleantech Group's "Pioneer Award"]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1659904 2012-07-09T15:08:14-04:00 2012-09-08T05:12:09-04:00

Mike Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-brown/ Our Way Out: First Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World. In it, he blames the massive reduction in our standard of life on climate change and too many people. Conversely, I recently heard about the legislature in North Carolina considering a law requiring that changes in sea level be forecast only in terms of history, and not using scientific methods. Is this all-too-common clash of minds coincidental or could one easily anticipate it? Well, I think there is a correlation. The more gloomy the predictive science, the easier to anticipate catastrophe, and the closer the potential demise, those who fear for their near-term economic well-being will turn to increasingly far-fetched "solutions" for comfort. Little else seems to work and traditional economics theory has little to say.

De Villiers, even if described by one reviewer as "not a radical," has got the answers wrong. Legislators in North Carolina have the answers wrong. Well, at least that's one thing they have in common! And they have a lot of company. Too many of the apocalyptic adherents preach that government has to act in ways which are politically incoherent and basically impossible. And the absence of reasonable solutions encourages those who see real disasters for them in the nearer term to act in ways that seem barely rational. I have a hunch that economic theory thinks of climate change as some kind of environmental imposition attributable to medieval problems of the commons, and aren't relating fixes to important economic realities we should be looking at.

Here's a better view: Our prosperity rests on how human ingenuity has used the surplus of really cheap, liquid, high-density energy to produce a standard of living in the last 100 years or so that would have been beyond belief to my Granddad when he was a teenager. We have lived at what I like to call "Peak Life." People could borrow money, whether as you and me or as countries, and count on that prosperity to deliver surpluses which enabled the repayment of the debt. So, guess what happened? Borrowing became endemic and we've now run into two massive, surprising physical barriers.

To understand this better, I like to think of three vises with our "standard of life in the centre" and two screws on either side and one on the top. The left-hand screw is called "Harder to Keep Producing Those Cheap Fuels" and it's gradually, but obviously, squeezing the heck out of that cheap fuel prosperity.

The right-hand screw is labeled "Result of Increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs)," and the resulting climate change is more slowly, but more implacably, going to squeeze the heck out of whatever of that old prosperity is left.

The top vise is called "Debt Ceiling" and limits growth, or causes the "Greek disease" of high unemployment by way of austerity needed to keep debt levels just within the boundary of insolvency. Even today's living standard is threatened by having to use a lot of what little is left of cheap energy productivity to repay those loans, something much harder to do now. So like de Villiers, it's not hard to think that the apocalypse is coming.

Clearly it would be a good idea to reverse those screws. We go looking for cheap fracked gas, or promote energy efficiency, or renewables. We subsidize fuels. Of course, that only works if there's enough money in the kitty, and there's probably not. We reschedule debt loads, or introduce inflation so they get paid off in cheap dollars. And we talk of carbon capture and geoengineering but nobody seems to get around to working out the math of just how enormous the cost is to reverse the growth in GHGs. No wonder there's a temptation to make the climate change vise handle stop rotating by denying it's happening at all. But everywhere we go, we have picked off the low-hanging fruit.

De Villiers' recipe is to do things such as make the electrical grid smarter, or to reduce the number of people (wars anyone?), or many similar solutions that need strong political action, and which cost a lot, or which by themselves cause alarm (carbon taxes?). But almost without exception, there's no elected politician anywhere ready to stand up and lose an election by espousing them. What the politicians are apparently ready to do is rewrite the rules. North Carolina isn't alone. In my own backyard, the government of British Columbia has just decided, in order to meet legal requirements to source a minimum percentage of energy from "clean" sources, that natural gas should be considered "green," as in "renewable."

Pen strokes count if you want to be in power (and that is not a pun). Coming to a neighbourhood near you -- more unreality shows. But are these really any more destructive than well-meaning authors like de Villiers prescribing expensive solutions that are destined to fail?

So folks, these recipes aren't going anywhere unless they are completely justified by the "market." Is there anything on the horizon which can actually replace that cheap, high-density liquid fuel, and not produce more GHGs?

So many of these well-meaning improvements are just incremental, and they're simply not going to result in GHG reductions anything like the specious targets which politicians are enamored with. There aren't enough people doing good math: the targets if met might do the job, but there is simply no chance of meeting the targets. It's true. All those unrealistic answers coming from either side just can't get it done. We need MIRACLES: a.k.a. breakthrough inventions.

But they're of no use without access to the early risk capital that just isn't going to come from governments. (Remember the top-down vise!) And from there to being widely applicable, this requires massive changes in the way that large, cash-rich corporations interface with conceptual geniuses at the heart of innovative little companies building the solutions we need for tomorrow. And that's where current economic practice just doesn't deliver.

And to Mr. de Villiers and those North Carolina legislators here's my prescription: face the reality of science, face the reality of permanent political inaction, detect the leaders in the private sector, trust markets, and don't be scared of breaking new ground. I'm tired of my standard of life getting "screwed."]]>