Google engineers: “Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8084
Every journalist knows it’s easy to steer readers’ understanding through selection of quotations. Recently the Wall Street Journal’s opinion editors did some quotation cherry-picking concerning the big picture of world response to climate change. For the WSJ‘s 28 November “Notable & Quotable ” blurb “Google’s green efforts,” the editors steered readers by spotlighting the premise of two Google engineers’ technical article while leaving their main message obscured.
On 18 November at IEEE Spectrum, Google’s Ross Koningstein and David Fork had published “What it would really take to reverse climate change .” Their subheadline carried an asserted premise and a leading question: “Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?”
In the subheadline for the “Notable & Quotable” excerpt, the WSJ editors retained the premise’s sense but omitted the question’s sense. They wrote only, “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.” Then, from the two engineers’ technical article introduction, the editors quoted several paragraphs briefly outlining the engineers’ premise, but at a crucial point again scanted the main message.
In the partially quoted introduction, the engineers described Google’s audacious R&D program to “produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades.” The effort had failed. The engineers wrote:
At the start…we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.
The strong phrase excluding doom aligns with WSJ opinion-page doctrine excluding future harm from climate change. The excerpt ends with the introduction’s third-to-last sentence, which distills the engineers’ premise: “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
Different approach? That does at least begin to illuminate a main message, unless readers take it to mean another thought that fits with WSJ opinion-page doctrine: “So let’s just wait and see.” In any case, the editors omitted the introduction’s final two sentences, which shine a spotlight down the road the engineers’ article actually takes: “So we’re issuing a call to action. There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities.”
Though the WSJ‘s readers can’t discern much hint of it from the excerpt carefully selected for “Notable & Quotable,” Koningstein and Fork most enthusiastically advocate action on climate. They begin by widening their premise with an assertion often disputed in WSJ opinion pieces and always disputed in WSJ editorials: “Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger.”
Then they explain in more detail how they arrived at their premise, which they also describe in more detail:
Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others.
They say more about their main message: “Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.”
Koningstein and Fork don’t name any “radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy,” but they present an economic and operational analysis on how such advances could fit the grid in the future. They cite only reforestation for carbon sequestration, then “exhort scientists and engineers to seek disruptive technologies” for that purpose.
They assert that “incremental improvements aren’t enough” and offer “a suggestion for how to foster innovation in the energy sector and allow for those breakthrough inventions.” They write:
Consider Google’s approach to innovation, which is summed up in the 70-20-10 rule espoused by executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The approach suggests that 70 percent of employee time be spent working on core business tasks, 20 percent on side projects related to core business, and the final 10 percent on strange new ideas that have the potential to be truly disruptive.
Wouldn’t it be great if governments and energy companies adopted a similar approach in their technology R&D investments? The result could be energy innovation at Google speed. Adopting the 70-20-10 rubric could lead to a portfolio of projects. The bulk of R&D resources could go to existing energy technologies that industry knows how to build and profitably deploy. These technologies probably won’t save us, but they can reduce the scale of the problem that needs fixing. The next 20 percent could be dedicated to cutting-edge technologies that are on the path to economic viability. Most crucially, the final 10 percent could be dedicated to ideas that may seem crazy but might have huge impact. Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn. Today, the energy innovation cycle is measured in decades, in large part because so little money is spent on critical types of R&D.
We’re not trying to predict the winning technology here, but its cost needs to be vastly lower than that of fossil energy systems. For one thing, a disruptive electricity generation system probably wouldn’t boil water to spin a conventional steam turbine. These processes add capital and operating expenses, and it’s hard to imagine how a new energy technology could perform them a lot more cheaply than an existing coal-fired power plant already does.
A disruptive fusion technology, for example, might skip the steam and produce high-energy charged particles that can be converted directly into electricity. For industrial facilities, maybe a cheaply synthesized form of methane could replace conventional natural gas. Or perhaps a technology would change the economic rules of the game by producing not just electricity but also fertilizer, fuel, or desalinated water. In carbon storage, bioengineers might create special-purpose crops to pull CO2 out of the air and stash the carbon in the soil. There are, no doubt, all manner of unpredictable inventions that are possible, and many ways to bring our CO2 levels down...if imagination, science, and engineering run wild.
That outlook will likely elicit the observation that Koningstein and Fork leave little room for the unplanned, unpredictable benefits of curiosity-driven basic research—discoveries that change the way scientists and engineers think. Later, though, they do mention that it’s lucky that “new discoveries are changing the way we think about physics, nanotechnology, and biology all the time.”
And they add something that the WSJ opinion editors might well allow to be said in an op-ed, but that they’d never say in an editorial or select for a “Notable & Quotable” blurb: “While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.