Green Energy Cursed by Incremental Change

The following opinion piece is from Clint Wilder, a contributing editor to Clean Edge and co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution.

PORTLAND, Ore. (Clean Edge) --For the past three years, I've been fortunate enough to attend the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York. At this year's event in September, CGI altered its traditional format of organizing the conference along the lines of "What" areas most need to be addressed in the world -- energy/climate change, global health, poverty alleviation, and education - to focus on the "How" of innovation, infrastructure, human capital, and financing.

All are critical to success in meeting the world's challenges, but in the energy/climate change sector, none is more imperative than innovation.

By innovation I don't mean just technology breakthroughs like large-scale battery storage or solar cell efficiency, though there's no denying the need for those. More important is innovation in thinking - throughout business, finance, and particularly government. We will never achieve the necessary goals of energy transformation and global carbon reduction without it.

We will move to a clean-energy future; the only question is when. But the enemies of this transformation are not just the usual suspects of climate change deniers, coal and oil lobbyists, and backward-thinking politicians. They are also complacency, a political system often ruled by inertia, and the curse of incremental change. "If all we do is simply improve what we've done in the past," said Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers on a CGI panel, "we're not going to get very far." It's one reason why Cisco has embraced a whole new industry, smart-grid technology, with such fervor.

Or as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman put it in a recent New York Times column on opposition to action on climate change, "It's not just a matter of vested interests. It's also a matter of vested ideas." Eleven months after what seemed to be a transformational U.S. presidential election, our internal political debates, and the news media that thrives on covering and instigating them, still seem mired in old ways of thinking.

Innovation used to be heroic in America, with breakthrough icons like Henry Ford (F Quote), Intel's(INTC Quote) Andy Grove, and Apple's(AAPL Quote) Steve Jobs lauded and revered. But when it comes to true innovation in energy -- the type of orders-of-magnitude increase in clean power and transportation that we're going to need -- the culture of "no we can't" still seems to rule the day.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's opposition to meaningful action on climate change, for example, has recently caused PG&E(PCG Quote), Exelon(EXC Quote), PNM Resources(PNM Quote), and Nike(NKE Quote) to resign their memberships or board positions, and I expect even more forward-thinking member companies will follow. Innovation resisters like the Chamber have helped perpetuate the myth of massive cost increases and wide-scale disruptions from even a modest carbon cap-and-trade system, and I fear that the average American believes them.

Which brings us to the global economy's (if not world history's) most dramatic example of transformation, for better or worse: China. As most of the clean-tech industry now knows, China has turned its economic development turbochargers to solar PV manufacturing, wind farm construction, efficient and electric vehicles, and other critical clean-energy sectors. "What I admire about China is the mindset of can-do," said Duke Energy (DUK Quote) CEO Jim Rogers, who at CGI announced a joint technology development deal with Chinese energy giant ENN Group encompassing solar, biofuels, smart grid, efficiency, carbon-capturing algae and other areas. "They're not looking for excuses as to why we can't do something."