Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Nathan Cummings Foundation Touted for Broad and Innovative Support for Climate Change
In Paris, President Barack Obama and the leaders of 19 other countries made energy technology innovation the central priority of international efforts to address climate change. “The truth is,” said the president, “if we adapt existing technologies and make them cheaper and faster and more readily available—if we improve energy efficiency—we’re still only going to get part of the way there and there’s still going to be a big gap to fill.”
Such a statement would have been politically unthinkable 10 years ago.
Until fairly recently, the dominant idea was that current-generation wind and solar power, coupled with energy efficiency, would play the lead role in stabilizing the climate. This cornerstone of thought among liberals and greens was summed up in Al Gore’s oft-repeated dictum that “we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming … we have all the technologies we need” ...