“No more pollution…or ocean dumpage. FROM NOW ON WE WILL TRAVEL IN TUBES” -Jack Black

Jack Black, the modern-day musical genius, once said in response to criticism of his music, “I’m tired of all this nay-saying! Why don’t YOU create something!?” This mantra could be perfectly applied to the global energy economy.

Why aren’t we going full force to create some awesome, renewable, scalable solutions rather than blaming democrats for high gas prices, calling for more offshore oil drilling (hello!?), or whining about our ever-increasing emissions? It seems like we’re spending more time naysaying than pioneering the energy solutions we need to solve the energy/climate crisis.

Thankfully there is a growing light at the end of the oil-economy tunnel – and I needn’t look further than an article by Andrew Leonard in this week’s Salon to see it.

Leonard cites some fantastic new analysis from market intelligence firm iSuppli, which predicted on Monday that by 2010, “worldwide investments in the production of photovoltaic (PV) cells will rise to the same level as those for semiconductor manufacturing by 2010.” That means that in only a few short years, solar panels could be as normal, cheap and accessible as owning a PC. And that’s for consumers and businesses alike – you, me, everybody. Booyah!

Continued solar development is one step in the inevitable direction of “Solar Grid Parity” – the point at which PV electricity costs the same or less than power derived from the electrical grid (a grid fueled currently mainly by coal and natural gas). The question we need to be asking ourselves now is: what can WE do to help the market speed up the process to the parity party?

One word: federal investment. Okay, that was two words. But the concept still stands: without significant resources and federal leadership allocated to innovation and dispersion, private investors will take at least until 2010 to make solar technology hit the market big time.

Do we have until 2010? Not if you ask climate scientists. As it stands, we’re stuck with a 385ppm carbon concentration with a 350ppm ecological target and no concerted effort to turn our colossus oil-tanker of an energy infrastructure around.

[To be honest, this type of long-range thinking and investment should have been happening 30 years ago… Oh wait, it was – under Carter. When Reagan came in, renewable energy research was cut almost entirely from the federal budgets. But, that’s history and we’ve got to focus on the problems at hand].

The government should create a steady, incentivized renewable energy tax environment (eight year solar ITC extension for example), strong RD&D efforts, and a government procurement program, to name a few options – all could make the diffusion of solar technology happen at a much greater speed.

Don’t worry – I’m not one of those “the government’s gonna solve all our problems” types. I’m happy as a clam that private investors are running with solar production, and I want the market to mitigate climate change just as bad as the next capitalist. But I want these solutions FASTER, damn it!

And I think the best way we can help the private sector roll out solar faster than this dude smashes watermelons with his head is to pour some top dollar into the brightest minds at the best universities and energy research centers. If the federal folks who dropped the cost of a single computer chip from $10,000 to $20 in only a decade can do anything for solar, we’ll soon be swimming in renewable energy (once we make a decent investment).

So let’s quit the naysaying and get down to work CREATING (i.e. investing in) the clean energy economy we want to see. We should aim to be like Jack Black – he invented the greatest singing technology since yodeling, and we could invent the greatest energy technology since hydrocarbons.

Did you hear that one about the Jesus cult drinking the kool-aid?  Or those little Scandinavian hamsters that launch themselves off cliffs en masse?  Psychologists aptly describe the social phenomenon of, well, stupid collective decisions, as “the Principle of Social Proof”.  PSP basically asserts that, in the absence of certainty, we look to others for correct behavior – this is especially relevant in groups.  So in the case of the lemming, every little rodent assumes their neighbor knows what’s going on, until… Splat!  It seems silly, but humans, and even environmentalists (who are categorically different than humans, clearly), are guilty of the same mind-numbing behavior.

Take carbon cap-and-trade and outright carbon regulations, for instance.  Nearly every environmental group and their mother has endorsed these two policy prescriptions for global warming, even though:
a.)    Cap-and-trade passes a politically unfeasible amount of increased energy cost to consumers
b.)    The highest politically feasible emissions reduction via cap-and-trade won’t actually solve climate change, or even come close
c.)    There’s very strong evidence to suggest that regulatory targets won’t be met… think Kyoto

Why is everyone on the carbon-cap-n-trade regulatory bandwagon when the idea so clearly… sucks?  I call it a bad case of lemming-brain, or PSP.

There is a strong tendency for us to follow the lead of our most renowned and respected experts on scientific, economic, and public policy.  Often unquestioningly, we take their advice for granted, maybe all too similarly to our sisters and brothers over in the Heaven’s Gate cult.  And where exactly are our experts getting their precedent for climate change policy?  From what I can tell, it’s the Montreal Protocol, which banned CFC’s in 1989, and air pollution cap and trade policies of the 1970’s.  At first glance, Montreal is a parallel example to global warming: one single pollutant concentrated in a single source industry with a cheap and easy replacement and comprehensive global consensus on enforcement…

Oh wait.  CFC’s are literally nothing like green house gas emissions, yet we’re operating as if they’re in the same paradigm.  Same thing with cap and trade for sulfur dioxide – the policy was created for a single industry (coal) with a relatively easy solution (smokestack scrubbers) that were quickly retrofitted and the problem of acid rain was solved.  Unless I’m unaware of some magical emissions-capturing device that can be retrofitted on every tail pipe, smokestack, cow butt, wildfire, and landfill leaching point, we’re not really technologically nor politically in quite the same place with climate change as we were with the ozone hole and acid rain problem.

So why are we using these two examples to craft our climate change policy when their situations are utterly un-analogous?  CAUSE EVERYONE JUMPED ON THE SAME CLIMATE BANDWAGON!  Wake up lemmings, wake up!  Let’s treat climate change like the globally complex problem it is by calling for globally powerful solutions – i.e., a huge investment in renewable energy combined with carbon regulation that will drop the price of clean energy below that of fossil, making our climate change solution not only economically feasible, but economically powerful.  As the leaders of the youth climate change movement, we don’t have to remain stuck in the same cap-and-trade black hole that the older generation has fallen into.  And as the more evolved mammal species, this is our opportunity to prove that, at least on climate issues, we’re just a bit smarter than lemmings.