Forging Public-Private Partnerships on a Journey from Global Integrated Assessment Models to Real World Technology Transition
Abstract
More than two decades ago, a host of modeling teams developed the capability to characterize the world's energy economy and construct future energy scenarios under various constraints on carbon emissions. The IPCC as well as legions of decision-makers guiding policy and investment in both public and private institutions have depended on their work. Results from these global integrated assessment models typically describe technology portfolios selected through a process that approximates the calculated judgement of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent dictator with perfect foresight able to optimally allocate capital in response to a uniform worldwide carbon price signal. Outside the abstractions of the models, this is difficult to replicate, yet the insights provide invaluable navigational aid. Over the last decade, activity on Capitol Hill and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as well as other agencies has drawn scholars with backgrounds ranging from earth science to political science to collaborate on problems in multiple sectors like energy, water, transportation, public health, and finance. Products of that period include, among other things, historic levels of federal investments in clean energy development, the first DOE energy technology strategy for U.S. federal investments in research and development, the first federal research program on the energy-water nexus, and the first consensus study by the National Academies of Science on innovation for development and deployment of increasingly clean power technologies, "The Power of Change." Yet, aside from China, the growth in capital investment in clean energy has slowed following the recovery from the Global Recession, and the world remains far shy of the $1 trillion in incremental annual investment that the global integrated assessment models estimated to be needed for the next three decades. New strategies for accelerating the clean energy transition are emerging through venues like the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, such as a financial instrument developed in the utility industry that could drive diesel out of public transportation. Breakthroughs such as these depend critically on partnerships that are a fitting tribute to the multi-disciplinary earth scientists whose modeling results have helped inspire the pursuit.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.U52A..05H
- Keywords:
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- 0493 Urban systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES