No Standard Oil by Deborah Gordon

Author:Deborah Gordon [Gordon, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190069476
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Building Back Better

Calls for investments in infrastructure keep growing louder. But such plans need to mitigate and adapt to global warming. For example, US President Joe Biden’s plan to “build back better” rests on an economy that is stronger than the one prior to the start of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Accomplishing such an arduous task will entail investing in infrastructure, innovation, manufacturing, clean energy, and more.142 Billions would need to be devoted to research incubators focusing on climate change solutions.

Such public investments in science and technology must be reinvigorated to reverse the major decline in relative spending worldwide (excluding China) over the past two decades143—lowered by a factor of four in the United States alone, as a percentage of both total outlays and gross domestic product (GDP) since 1960.144 Major climate-friendly innovations in the petroleum sector are long overdue, and no other actor has the wherewithal to dig deeply into precommercial, cutting-edge R&D than government laboratories. In collaboration with industry researchers and civil society actors (academics and expert retirees), government laboratories and agencies have the know-how and staying power to develop a clean energy transition strategy.

The United States alone has seventeen national energy laboratories that translate basic science into innovation, and I have benefited from working with many of them.145 This includes the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the national government’s advanced research project agency focused on energy. ARPA-E scientists are beginning to study a transition strategy for decarbonizing oil refining.146 This effort and others like it could be further enhanced by the creation of a new federal agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate (ARPA-C), an advanced research project agency focused on carbon and climate change.147

Such efforts do not stop at US borders. For example, Saudi Arabia has exponentially increased its R&D spending over the past two decades and launched research centers worldwide. Across the globe, government energy R&D spending has remained relatively flat and grew by only 3 percent in 2019, with the most funds spent in Europe, the United States, and China. The good news is that roughly 80 percent of these funds went to low-GHG technologies, such as CCS and green hydrogen—which took off in 2020.148 However, government R&D tends to wax and wane amid economic cycles, a tendency that poses risks to the development of clean energy technologies, especially in countries that intend to grow their oil and gas sector in the coming decades.

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