Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Energy policy is on everyone's mind these days. The U.S. presidential campaign focused on energy independence and exploration ("Drill, baby, drill!"), climate change, alternative fuels, even nuclear energy. But there is a serious problem endemic to America's energy challenges. Policymakers tend to do just enough to satisfy political demands but not enough to solve the real problems, and they wait too long to act. The resulting policies are overly reactive, enacted once damage is already done, and they are too often incomplete, incoherent, and ineffectual. Given the gravity of current economic, geopolitical, and environmental concerns, this is more unacceptable than ever. This important volume details this problem, making clear the unfortunate results of such short-sighted thinking, and it proposes measures to overcome this counterproductive tendency.

"This chapter focuses on how the United States can accomplish ... reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. I argue that demonstration and deployment of technologies to capture carbon dioxide from large stationary sources, storing the waste CO2 in geological formations, is likely to be an essential component of any carbon reduction strategy, both for the United States and for the world, and is also consistent with economic and security concerns. It also reviews the major technical challenges involved with widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage, and discusses policies that would lead to the specific goal of capturing and storing the CO2 from all large stationary sources by the middle of this century."

"The book's title—Acting in Time—refers to the persistent problem in U.S. energy policy that typically just enough is done to satisfy the short-term political imperatives, but not enough is done to actually solve the underlying problems themselves. As a result, many of the fundamental economic, environmental, and security-related challenges arising from patterns of U.S. energy production and consumption have become more intractable. Some now approach a point of crisis."

The United States and China account for about 43% of global emissions. What are the barriers, incentives and policy solutions to deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies in the world's biggest two CO2-emitting countries?

Jeffery Lewis examines patterns in Chinese defense investments, strategic force deployments, and arms control behavior to assess China's nuclear strategy.

This chapter focuses on the role of government policy in the evolution of GM technology and institutions.

Governments and industry face a dilemma: how to reconcile increased energy demand with the need to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) offers a means of reducing pollution from coal-fired power generation.

This is the first book to bridge the gap between the "naysayers" and "cheerleaders", and to provide a penetrating examination of the realities, complexities, benefits and pitfalls of GM adoption in developing countries that are desperately fighting poverty while trying to stay afloat in the hyper-competitive global economy.

"Biotechnology enthusiasts emphasize the power of the new science to address a seemimgly endless array of constraints facing resource poor farmers. But the process of technological innovation depends as much on institutions as on the science...."

"Investing in agricultural technology increasingly turns up these days on lists of the top ten practical actions the rich world could take to contribute to reducing global poverty...."