4 MOONSHOT PROJECTS

POLICY AND INNOVATION COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER

Many non-emitting options (technologies or new practices) could decarbonize a given slice of the emissions pie if rolled out globally. For each to do so, we must either improve the cost modestly and pass policy mandates or incentives in many countries, or improve the cost significantly so that the clean option outcompetes the emitting alternatives in the global economy without policy incentives.

This book uses “policy” to mean laws and regulations that require or encourage certain behavior. This includes, for example, mandates or subsidies. “Policy” here doesn’t include actions taken by government bodies directly, such as deploying a set of charging stations or carrying out a project to coordinate fuel synthesis research. Most direct government “initiatives” that we’ll discuss fall under the umbrella of work to promote “innovation,” the development and improvement of technologies to lower their cost and increase their scale of deployment.

Some technologies are already “affordable enough” for policy to be feasible—for example, electric cars are cheaper to operate than gas cars but currently more expensive up front to buy. Subsidies or mandates could probably be made big enough to spur a rapid switch to electric cars. Some agricultural practices that reduce emissions can save money for farmers or improve yields at the same cost, and so they require only regulation of or education for farmers.

When we rely on policy to ensure that a given option rolls out fully by 2050, the relevant mandates or incentives must be adopted in most countries. If a few countries with insignificant emissions fail to adopt the policies in time, other countries would have to pay for sequestration to make up the difference, or the international community could use tariffs or sanctions to force cooperation from the remaining emitters.

Even convincing most but not all countries to adopt a given policy can be a slow and difficult road. International agreements and grassroots movements can shift what is politically viable and speed up the timeframe for adopting the relevant policies. Technology cost improvement can make mandates or subsidies more politically acceptable. But a 100% strategy that relies on policies still requires many individual political efforts—and that means lots of proactive decisions, which makes solutions less likely to scale fully in time, as noted in Chapter 1.

Innovation that makes clean options definitively cheaper, on the other hand, can spread solutions without the need for policy in each individual country. A small number of entities—as few as one if that one were the president of the United States or China—can start the required efforts to improve technology costs, and then sell those technologies to the rest of the world. However, there’s no certainty that any given technology will improve in time to be definitively cheaper than its polluting alternatives. That’s why policy mandate and incentive efforts should be pursued wherever they are viable—they may become necessary to close the gap to a 100% solution.

As noted before, “innovation” is used to mean both invention of new technologies or practices as well as the development of already-emerging technologies and practices to the point of having been proven, demonstrated at full scale, financed, and commercially deployed. Innovation also means improvements to existing technologies, including inventions of new components, but also advances in business or manufacturing processes that bring down costs, or public initiatives that bring technologies to larger-scale manufacturing and deployment to lower costs through pure economies of scale.

Innovation and policy complement each other. Policy in one country that ramps up deployment of a given technology will likely bring down the cost of that technology and thereby make it easier to deploy elsewhere. Innovation that directly decreases the costs of technologies or practices makes it more politically viable to mandate or subsidize those technologies or practices through policy.

However, there is one key difference between innovation and policy when it comes to achieving a 100% solution to climate change: policy can be repealed; innovation cannot. In Australia, the governing coalition passed a carbon tax in 2011. In short order, a new coalition won power and repealed it. In the United States, the Obama administration created regulations to require more efficient cars and cleaner power plants. Within a few years, the Trump administration had repealed those mandates. Yet, over that whole period, coal power plants continued to be replaced by methane ones because methane had become the definitively cheaper fuel due to innovation on methane drilling techniques. Innovation-based solutions to climate change will likewise be more permanent than policy-based measures.

Policy can be repealed; innovation cannot.

And because some technologies are currently too expensive or undeveloped for policy mandates to force their adoption, even in industrialized countries, some amount of innovation is needed by definition. Those of us hoping to see a 100% solution by 2050 should focus on making sure that innovation happens.

PRIVATE INNOVATION IS TOO SLOW

Activists and policy leaders in industrialized countries must focus on ensuring that every piece of necessary technology is developed and becomes affordable in time. We cannot afford to be distracted by “doing our part” through incremental reforms. Technology will take some time to ramp up to full-scale production and will take further time to be deployed everywhere, so the innovations to set each technology on a successful path must be achieved in the near future.

The exact timing varies depending on the technology, but this order of steps takes time and must be completed by 2050.

Private researchers at colleges and companies are constantly working on cleaner ways of doing all sorts of processes.

For example, a couple of startups recently started trying to commercialize a kind of seaweed that, when substituted for as little as 1–2% of cattle feed, virtually eliminates methane belches from livestock.²⁴ Companies such as Tesla and Chevy are already commercializing electric cars and starting to roll out electric trucks. Other startups are developing carbon-capture technology, while others still are devoted to the synthesis of carbon-neutral or carbon-free fuels.²⁵

There’s nothing physically impossible with the idea that this private innovation could solve the problem fully by 2050. But given the normal pace of innovation, the chance that researchers would hit upon, and companies would fully deploy, every single technology we need between now and 2050 is extremely low.

The slow pace of innovation has to do with the fact that innovations benefit society as a whole far more than they benefit their inventors. Economists call this a “positive externality” (the opposite of “negative externalities” such as carbon pollution—which hurts society as a whole much more than it hurts the companies or individuals that emit a given amount of pollution). Because of this fact, the economy systematically underinvests in innovation. That’s partly why politicians of all stripes tend to agree that government funding should support innovation efforts: to bring benefits to society that individual people and companies wouldn’t have enough profit-driven incentive to pursue.

Innovation funding tends to come from either government bodies—usually focused toward academic or very early-stage commercial research—and venture capitalists—usually geared toward proven, ready-to-scale technologies that need only a good business plan to take off. In between is a gap that observers call the “valley of death” for innovation. Many climate change solutions are currently floundering in this valley.

To dramatically increase the odds that we will find and fully deploy each needed technology, we should have public projects to spur the necessary innovation. This is essentially a larger-scale version of the existing consensus that government bodies should invest to correct the “positive externality” of innovation. In this case, we need those investments to be massive and focused on key realms of innovation that will bring the great benefit of solving climate change to society.

A MOONSHOT EFFORT

Let’s focus for a moment on the United States, where this kind of public innovation has had storied success in the past. Military research has led to the commercialization of radar, GPS, the Internet, and more. Government-coordinated projects have mapped the human genome to accelerate medicinal inventions, developed both solar and nuclear power into viable electricity generation technologies, and put people on the moon.

Some people now call for a New Manhattan Project to drive innovation for climate change solutions. Others call for an Apollo Program. When Congress created an entity that oversees a degree of valley-of-death-stage innovation on clean energy, they named it ARPA-E after the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency that helped make GPS and the Internet commercial realities. None of these are perfect comparisons for the type of government innovation we need today—the Manhattan Project simply required proving that already-understood science would work for a single invention and working out the engineering to build it. The Apollo Program is a better example: the US federal government funded and coordinated a massive set of efforts, from basic research to full-scale engineering and deployment. It partnered with companies in many ways. It cast a wide net in considering technologies, and focused on those technologies that turned out to have promise. It had a single goal, but needed many technologies to achieve it, and no one knew exactly which would be the successful ones at the beginning. However, the Apollo Program never had to scale technologies up to the point that they were commercially viable (if that were the case, we might have had commercial solar power decades sooner). And DARPA/ARPA-E are focused on applied research—more product-oriented than basic research funding, but still generally limited to lab-scale academic inquiry without the level of focus and coordination needed for climate change.

The youth-led Sunrise Movement and others call for a “World War II–scale” mobilization, which is perhaps the most apt comparison. During WWII, the US economy was dramatically transformed to supply the Allies with all the military equipment they needed. New technology was invented, such as practical radar. Existing technology—such as airplane manufacturing—was scaled up massively to bring costs down and provide the necessary amounts of equipment. Not only did it help win the war, but the massive industrial mobilization boosted the economy enormously.

FDR’s leadership led to a dramatic scale-up of airplane manufacturing. In all, growing out of the Great Depression, the US economy grew 11–12% per year during WWII.²⁶

It required ambitious goals, though. FDR’s call early in the war to quadruple US airplane output to 50,000 per year was not unlike JFK’s later call to put a man on the moon by the end of a decade. In both cases, these presidents were met with wild enthusiasm, but also skepticism about the likelihood of hitting such ambitious targets. In the end, the United States exceeded both goals. In 1944, the United States manufactured almost 100,000 airplanes;²⁷ by the end of 1969, NASA had landed not one but two Apollo crews on the moon.²⁸

Similarly, the scale of deployment for climate change–solving technology will be massive. Many people will be skeptical about the idea that it could ever be possible to build enough new electricity generation to not only replace our entire fossil fuel grid but to power newly electrified processes, synthesize carbon-neutral fuels, and pull CO₂ from the air. And people may doubt that new cement production processes could ever roll out fully in a thirty-year timeframe, or that we could convince any significant percentage of farmers to manage their soil more sustainably. But if we could build those hundreds of thousands of airplanes in five years, and land those spacecraft on the moon in ten, we can surely transform the world’s energy system in thirty if we innovate and scale up technology in a massive way.

The top goal of US climate activism and policy leadership should be to create moonshot-type projects to coordinate and fund innovation and to support the deployment of new technologies and new practices worldwide.

Activists and policymakers outside the United States may not have quite the same large economy and national budget to work with, but a coalition of smaller countries could carry out the same sorts of efforts. Individual countries can also tackle specific pieces with a mind to how they will fit into a 100% solution. (See Chapter 11 for more ideas on the role of various countries.)

COORDINATION AND FUNDING

Coordination is needed so that research and development efforts focus on technologies that could actually be a part of a 100% solution. Right now much research is based on what professors find academically interesting, what topics are likely to lead to new scientific knowledge that could be published in a paper, and what has long-established sources of funding. That will need to shift toward research focused around products that can be commercialized (and by 2050) rather than simply published in an academic paper. Through public projects, government bodies should direct willing partners to conduct research in areas that seem most promising or impactful and steer efforts away from avenues that have proven themselves to be too slow, impractical, or insignificant. Governments’ ability to convene researchers and funders to support them can help highlight which avenues of work are most crucial. Public projects would also expand the scale of collaboration and knowledge sharing among innovators, thereby making it more likely the best minds will hit on the necessary ideas.

The normal pace of innovation might eventually get us to negative emissions, but not by 2050. As we will see in the coming chapters, the pace of innovation and deployment must accelerate by several orders of magnitude, which will require major funding increases. Presidential candidates in the United States have started talking about doubling the current worldwide level of clean tech innovation funding, but across basic research, testing, and early scale-up, the total will need to be far higher. For a rough order of magnitude, we should assume that effective moonshot projects would require a few hundred billion dollars per year of direct funding, which would be leveraged to shift something like 1–2% of global GDP (a couple trillion dollars per year) toward investments in clean tech deployment. This is in line with models that have projected global business-as-usual investments in fossil infrastructure vs investments of similar magnitude in clean infrastructure instead.²⁹

Yes, that is a lot of money. But it is simply an up-front investment over a few decades to significantly decrease the costs the world would otherwise face, of building and maintaining fossil infrastructure ($2–3 trillion per year plus costs from climate change damage), deploying clean technology without having improved its cost through innovation ($4 trillion per year or more), or dealing with the impacts of climate change (probably also in the low trillions of dollars per year in addition to whatever infrastructure is paid for).³⁰

Moreover, hundreds of billions of dollars per year is manageable within existing national budgets. The United States alone could dedicate that level of funding to moonshot-type projects on climate change, and the benefits of new innovations would boost the US economy in the end. On average, government-led innovation brings a 20% to 30% or higher return on investment to the US economy; some projects have brought much larger payoffs, such as the Human Genome Project, which is estimated at a 14,000% return on investment.³¹

Tens of those hundreds of billions could come from redirecting funds that are currently subsidizing fossil fuels. Some of the project’s work could be done through the already-large military research departments, maintained as part of the $600-billion-per-year military budget. More could be done in partnership with private companies and labs, leveraging federal funds to coordinate many times more in total funding. And still more could be co-funded with other countries that want to share the economic benefits of such innovation.

STRUCTURE

The projects could be carried out by a new agency or agencies created for this task, or could be a set of initiatives among existing agencies. Some new entity might be preferable, because it could be more independent. Currently, Congress funds many important initiatives, but wastes money by requiring various projects to happen in certain legislators’ districts. Sometimes legislators pressure federal agencies to do the same, and sometimes they succeed, but there is good precedent for agency leaders resisting such pressure. (Energy Secretary Steven Chu, for example, was known among members of Congress for politely listening to such requests, then reiterating that his agency made decisions based only on maximizing efficiency and impact.³²)

A new quasi-public, independent agency funded in large lump sums from Congress (or the president, who could redirect a substantial amount of money toward such projects even without Congressional approval) would minimize such politics-based decisions. It could then coordinate with and fund other agencies and private partners, aided by the White House when there is a supportive president who can add extra clout to its work.

This model could also apply to non-US-led projects: a coalition of European and Asian countries, for instance, perhaps with the partnership of some international companies, could give an independent NGO or new UN agency a similar level of funding. Such an organization could then coordinate and fund various entities and efforts around the world.

METHODS

Some technologies will require basic research, which the relevant agency or agencies can fund and coordinate. Some will require testing and demonstration, which could benefit from centralized, publicly available labs and test beds built or co-funded by government investments. Some will require help with initial scale-up—a tricky phase of commercialization in terms of our climate change–solving timeframe. Scale-up brings the cost down from the “first of a kind” unit to the “nth of a kind” unit, which is usually much cheaper because of having an established and honed manufacturing process, steady supply chain, expertise learned by workers, and economies of scale.

Project leaders will have to find ways to coordinate early adopters of new technologies, including in some cases federal government agencies, and sometimes help fund the production of the first batch of units of a new technology to reduce the time it takes to fully establish a manufacturing process and bring costs to competitive levels. For non-energy shifts, efforts and funding support will have to focus on direct initiatives around the world, for instance to educate farmers about the benefits of better soil and fertilizer practices.

Much of these projects’ work will be proactive—identifying specific technologies needed, convening industries and researchers, reaching out to international partners—but much will also be reactive. Agencies will have to continually assess progress and prospects for various technologies, note when any have proven impractical and adjust accordingly, identify new options worth exploring, and decide in each moment the best distribution of a limited amount of money. Unlike a policy, for which language is written ahead of time and implemented once a bill is passed, the projects will start with only a vision of what they need to develop and a framework of how they will work. They will have to implement all these ideas with real people—farmers, company leaders, agency administrators—as partners, and react nimbly to changing technological or economic situations.

THE CORE OF THE 100% SOLUTION

Such projects will bring us as close as possible to guaranteeing that the world will achieve negative emissions by 2050. Conveniently, innovation is popular and permanent.³³ And the scale of funding required, though large, is not unreasonable for a small number of countries to cover. Through a focus on innovation, a tiny number of global leaders could successfully set the world on track toward a 100% solution.

The five pillars form the blueprint for exactly what these coordinated innovation efforts must achieve. The pillars are numbered in roughly the chronological order that their emissions reductions must play out, starting with electricity generation and ending with sequestration. The following five chapters explain the specifics of each pillar, the current state of innovation and relevant policies that could be pursued, and the most crucial steps for public projects to take to ensure that clean options are developed and adopted in time.