Take for example the recent and ongoing FY2012 federal budget debate. Budget austerity is running rampant through Congress and no program - whether it's vital investments in economic growth or not - is safe. Key energy innovation programs like ARPA-E, the Office of Science, and R&,Prada Outlet;D programs for advanced nuclear energy, advanced solar, electric vehicles, and the like are threatened with cuts at a time when we should be doubling down on our investments to accelerate development of affordable, breakthrough clean technologies. But during the amendment process for the House Energy and Water appropriations bill, more time was spent debating the efficacy of a light bulb efficiency standard than trying to find ways to support vital energy innovation programs. And it showed - the final House appropriations bill proposes to cut these programs by and if it weren't for a last minute bipartisan effort to return ARPA-E to FY2011 levels (albeit low levels), the outcome would have been worse. Imagine if the full energy budget appropriations process was about debating targeted investments in energy innovation? At the end of the day, supporting breakthrough technologies holds more promise for drastically reducing emissions, reducing oil imports, and potentially boosting economic growth than does just efficiency standards, but the budget debate fails to reflect this reality.
The national energy and climate policy debate is broken. If it doesn't get fixed, any new policy at the city, state, or national level may very well fail to address America's energy challenges in any meaningful way.
Simply put, our climate and energy policy priorities and ideologies are out of whack. So let's try something new. Let's make innovation the default policy choice in any and all climate and energy policy debates. To start, let's ditch the preconceived notion that a carbon price or command-and-control policies are more important to our energy challenges than supporting technology development and ensure that both are working in synergy. So it's not to say that's a carbon price and deployment policies don't have a role in innovation policy - they do and should. It's to say that these policies should play a well-aligned, complimentary role in supporting innovative technologies and not as the central climate and energy policy. The debate should be about how best to use loan guarantees or tax incentives or regulations to support competitive, innovative technologies and it's a debate that needs to happen now.
Another place to start is to have an open and honest discussion about the role of government in spurring innovation. Government has a proactive and limited role to play that requires public investments and collaboration with the private sector. The United States has done this before to develop the last century's worth of breakthrough technologies and we have to do it again. Its fallacy to think the market can do it all on its own. So the debate should be about how best to leverage the public and private sector together to support competitive, innovative technologies and it's a debate that needs to happen now.
Part of the problem: in many cases, the failed approaches and ideologies of years past are still limiting or outright stifling progress on climate and energy policy. Specifically, advocates are relying on misguided default policy choices to inform their arguments to the detriment of supporting the nascent clean economy. And the problem is bipartisan. On the left, a wide swath of climate advocates still cling to the idea that a price on carbon/cap-and-trade/command-and-control approach is the correct method for driving the adoption of affordable clean technologies and reducing emissions. On the right, a wide swath of advocates still cling to the idea that government has little role in supporting groundbreaking industries like clean technology and doing so is nothing more than "picking winners and losers."
By. Matthew Stepp at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation