Climate Progress's ongoing series on stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm is an excellent resource for anyone seeking, as I am, to better understand both climate science and climate policy.
The apocalyptic stuff can be found in Part 0, though tonight I'm more interested in Part 3's puncturing of my slim hope that a "Manhattan Project for energy" that could somehow save us from ourselves:
“Typically it has taken 25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.”More extreme technopessimism in Part 4.
Note that this tiny toe-hold comes 25 years after commercial introduction. The first transition from scientific breakthrough to commercial introduction may itself take decades. We still haven’t seen commercial introduction of a hydrogen fuel cell car and have barely seen any commercial fuel cells — over 160 years after they were first invented.
This tells you two important things. First, new breakthrough energy technologies simply don’t enter the market fast enough to have a big impact in the time frame we care about. We are trying to get 5% to 10% shares — or more — of the global market for energy, which means massive deployment by 2050 (if not sooner).
Second, if you are in the kind of hurry we are all in, then you are going to have to take unusual measures to deploy technologies far more aggressively than has ever occurred historically. That is, speeding up the deployment side is much more important than generating new technologies. Why? Virtually every supply technology in history has a steadily declining cost curve, whereby greater volume leads to lower cost in a predictable fashion because of economies of scale and the manufacturing learning curve.
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