Radical shifts of institutional and policy design are rare in government. Evolving slowly and learning from past mistakes, modern governments seem to embody the modern idiomatic formulation of Edmund Burke’s cautionary warning against radical changes in government: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. When governments confront new problems for which they have no past experience addressing, policy makers usually look to historical analogues to find a solution instead of proposing something new and untested. This approach to policy design usually works well. With climate change, however, policy makers failed to make the right historical comparisons.
Steve Rayner and Gwyn Prins have documented how the structure of the Kyoto Protocol was based on the Montreal Protocol, and how these design similarities were based on poor comparisons between the regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the primary causative agent of ozone depletion. As Rayner and Prins explain, although the regulation of CFCs and carbon dioxide appear to be similar problems, there exist critical differences between them. Rayner and Prins characterize the regulation of CFCs as a “tame” problem, one where the solution is known and for which implementation is straight-forward (adding CFC scrubbers to industrial plants). In comparison, climate change is a “wicked” problem, for which the solutions are unclear and difficult to implement. Unlike ozone depletion, climate change is “the result of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply system of fossil energy.” Fixing this problem will require a radical overhaul of our world’s energy system; however, the Kyoto Protocol failed to provide a robust mechanism to make this happen.
As the Kyoto expiration date nears, there is growing consensus that the structure of Kyoto was fundamentally flawed, and that policy makers drew the wrong historical analogies in the design phase. More and more people are recognizing that a massive federally funded R&D effort is needed to develop the knowledge and technologies necessary to make carbon mitigation a reality. Bjørn Lomborg, chair of the Copenhagen Consensus argued in favor of this approach in a recent Washington Post column. An R&D centered approach has also been favored by the Bush Administration. A growing number of voices is calling for a Manhattan Project for energy. Such language is usually used for rhetorical reasons; however, it would be a mistake to base any large-scale energy R&D initiative on institutional structure of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. There are at least a few differences that could make a large, centrally-managed effort fail to provide the technologies we need.
With such an R&D effort, the final product needed is not a single technological artifact, but a plethora of new technologies and knowledge about increased energy efficiency that must be embedded throughout the fabric of our economy. For this reason, close involvement with the private sector is critical. Unlike the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project, new technologies must be cheap enough to commercialize (by comparison, even 40 years after Apollo the private sector has not discovered a profitable method of commercial manned space flight). To date, the federal government has a poor track record of producing useful and commercializable energy technologies within its federal R&D apparatus. One major cause of this failure is poor institutional design of the nation’s energy R&D infrastructure. As Ogden, et al. argue in a recent article in Issues in Science and Technology, the DOE has adhered too closely to the defense model of technology development, which is highly linear in nature. Unfortunately, such a model fails to work with energy technology because cost constraints not need to be considered at every stage of technology development.
Few anticipated the tremendous social changes that followed both the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. It’s already clear that the much needed transformation of our world’s energy system will produce surprising and possibly undesirable social outcomes as well. One need not look further than the worldwide food crisis that has been created, in part, by the growing use of corn-based ethanol in the United States. The R&D institutions that drive the next wave of energy innovation must be reflexive, that is, they must be flexible enough to anticipate potential negative social implications of their work and adjust accordingly. Reflexivity is especially important with path-dependent technologies like energy technology, as the long-term costs of any negative social outcome are potentially irreversible. With a class of technologies so fundamental to our society as energy technologies, we cannot afford to deal with negative social implications after the fact.
It is unclear what form future energy R&D institutions will take. However, it is abundantly clear that the model we presently use needs to be reconsidered.
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Tags: energy, institutional design, R&D
