Is green technology like vaccine technology?

India's former intransigence on GHG emissions has unfortunately quickly reasserted itself after a brief hiatus.

Then just yesterday, India’s prime minister ratcheted up the rhetoric again, reiterating the need for developed countries to provide developing countries with the wherewithal to clean up their economies—essentially for free. From the FT:

“Climate friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public good,” [Prime Minister Manmohan] Singh told the United Nations-sponsored Delhi High Level Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer. “Such an approach has been adopted successfully in the case of pharmaceutical technologies for the benefit of HIV/Aids victims in developing countries. The moral case of a similar approach for protecting our planet and its life support systems is equally compelling.”

Chinese officials quickly echoed the call, saying that access to advanced technologies was “crucial” to the outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit. That repeated call for unfettered access to clean technology is the one thing that unsettles big companies (such as General Electric, Siemens, and the like) which are otherwise thrilled about the business prospects of a world dedicated to rebuilding its entire energy infrastructure.

The comparison of green technology to pharmaceutical technology is a brilliant one for developing countries – if I were them I'd ride it for all it’s worth.

The first tech bubble? 1720

Robin Hanson passes on this well-reasoned argument that tech bubbles preceded dot-coms by several centuries:

Although 1720 is not generally viewed as a period of technological novelty, we argue in this paper that there were at least three critical innovations that took place in a very short span of time; two of which were financial innovations, the other was a major potential shift in the configuration of global trade. The first innovation was financial engineering at a national scale. The Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company issued equity shares in exchange for government debt; in effect converting the national debt into corporate stock. …

The second innovation was an incipient shift in global trade. Both of the companies were set up to exploit trade in the Americas. … The third innovation was also financial. The first publicly traded insurance corporations were chartered in Great Britain 1720, as a result of the Act. As such, they represented a new model of capital formation for maritime insurance firms – in a nation built on maritime trade.

These do seem like indisputably valuable innovations in the long-run (like, say, ATMs, as opposed to securitization).

(or has securitization just passed through its initial collapse, preceding a long and fruitful contribution to human economic activity?)

I would be interested to see similarly far-reaching historical analysis on commodity cycles. I have the impression that real commodity prices have fallen throughout human history, but I lack the facts to back it up.

Oilfield technology is basically good enough

Via Green Sheet, long-time energy investment banker Matthew Simmons doesn't think oilfield technology has much room for improvement (and therefore technological progress is not a good argument against Peak Oil).

The final topic the Gang discussed was the rapid advances in oilfield technology. Sadly, this is the greatest myth of all. I spent four decades as an investment banker to the global oil-service industry, which collectively invented all of this technology. The concept that there are new innovations in this area is false.

In fact, the seeds of this so-called technological revolution -- the ability to exploit oil from deep water or drill horizontally -- were first developed 40 years ago. I personally raised a great deal of the venture capital that helped implement some of the most important technical advances in the industry. Our firm, through advising on mergers, consolidations, reorganizations, and bankruptcies, helped save the oil-service companies that created these great technological advances that help us find and commercially exploit oil and gas.

None of this technology is new -- in fact, it is now quite mature. Sadly, there are few new ideas in the oilfield pipeline to replace advances that were made decades ago.

These ideas may be old, but they are still in the process of being deployed commercially against new reserves, whether deepwater like BP's new Tiber find or onshore unconventional reserves like oil sands and shale oil. To me, the crux of the technology argument is not that a new silver bullet will magically appear on the horizon, but rather that the frontier of existing technology allows us to exploit a wide range of unconventional oil reserves, of whose production potential we have only scratched the surface (e.g. Canada and Venezuela are both estimated to have reserves in oil sands equal to the entire world's reserves of conventional crude). At higher prices, probably, which means lower demand, but not imminent and catastrophic supply shortfall.

Popular Science on the future of farming

Popular Science has a great article on the future of farming, or, more specifically, 8 innovations that could reshape the future of farming. Nothing mind-blowingly original, but I think most of them have high potential in the next decade, and Popular Science does a nice job of laying them out in a very accessible format. Here's a quick summary and commentary on the 8 innovations:

1. Farm the Desert: Greenhouses built near coasts turn plentiful seawater into freshwater for crops, without expensive desalinization plants. (I particularly like this one - imagine the potential in the Middle East, North Africa, the Pacific coast of the Americas, Australia...)

2. Growth with Precision: Networked soil sensors signal how much fertilizer and water are needed and when. (Definitely well on its way, at least in the U.S.)

3. Rebuild Rice: Genetically engineer rice to change its photosynthesis, so we can grow more of it in any conditions. (The idea of converting rice from C3 to C4 is fairly radical, but this research is underway at the IRRI in Manila)

4. Replace Fertilizer: Seeding fields with microbes that pull nitrogen from the air. (This will make Michael Pollan and other crusaders against the NPK oversimplification happy)

5. Re-Map a Continent: Gather extensive data on land use to better target new farming technologies. (Underway with the Gates foundation's $4.7m grant to HarvestChoice)

6. Use Robot Labor: Mechanized farmers for monitoring, pruning, thinning, and even picking produce. (I have a hard time seeing the labor economics of robots beating migrant workers any time soon)

7. Resurrect the Soil: Add biochar, a form of charcoal that provides plants with vital nutrients while also sequestering carbon. (Biochar is the next silver bullet on the horizon which will undoubtedly not meet expectations...)

8. Make Supercrops: Engineer the cassava into the perfect crop. (This is another one of my favorites, although I don't have a great sense for the scientific difficulty involved)

I would add at least one more, courtesy of Vaclav Smil - drastically reduce the amount of food which is wasted (estimates vary, but 30-40% losses between field and fork is very plausible). Analogous to energy efficiency, efficiency in the food chain is perhaps the most impactful (and lowest-impact from an environmental perspective) lever for meeting rising food demand. Not easy, given distributed nature of the challenge and the behavioral changes required, but nevertheless one that should be included. As Smil reminds constantly, too often we forget that increasing supply is not the only way.