When must C be zero?

If you allow poor countries and the land-use sector, including livestock, to continue to have non-zero emissions, then rich countries need to be net zero by 2050, if you really want just two degrees of warming.

If poor countries and agriculture emit significant carbon for the foreseeable future, how can the entire globe achieve net-zero emissions by the end of the century?

Well, there are scenarios that show rich countries having negative carbon dioxide emissions4 in the years beyond 2050.

You’ve noted that the energy industry spends 0.23 percent of revenues on research and development, compared to 20 percent for pharma and 15 percent for IT, and you blame the long lag between invention and impact in energy on those paltry investments. Is there any way to change that?

You can look at history and ask yourself, “Who do you think were the greatest energy innovators of all time?” I think Charles Algernon Parsons5 [the inventor of the steam turbine] was really incredible. I think Rudolf Diesel6 [the inventor of the diesel engine] was also incredible. Go and look at how much money they or the company they worked for made. Diesel committed suicide because he thought he was going bankrupt. Parsons made basically nothing. During the first 20 years after you invent a new energy technology, as [Vaclav] Smil7 likes to remind us, the deployment that takes place, with very, very few exceptions, is quite modest. So the incentive for the inventor is most reduced where the adoption cycles are greater than 20 years. We don’t have a similar situation in IT. We don’t have that even in health care, although they sometimes complain that the 20 years don’t give them enough time.

A more than 20-year investment cycle seems an awfully long time. Therefore, does energy need a model for innovation different from those that have driven other technologies?

For a lot of energy innovations, you’ve got to give government credit. With nuclear energy, all the key research was done either by the government or by government funding. With fossil fuels, there was clearly some spillover effect from the digital revolution to analyze geological data, but it was government investing that helped to get to this incredibly precise horizontal drilling capability. So basic R&D spending has been the thing that has driven most of the breakthroughs. We do need private-sector risk-takers to go out and scale the stuff up, which is why we paired the idea that 20 leading countries must double their energy R&D over the next five years with a group of investors [the Breakthrough Energy Coalition] that will take on funding high-risk, breakthrough companies.

When we spoke about energy in 2010, you reminded me that the total U.S. government investment in energy R&D was around $5 billion, about 10 percent of the money it spends on defense-related research. That’s not changed much in the last six years. If the government did double its investment in energy R&D, where would you want that money to be spent—on more fundamental research or on supporting the scaling up of new technologies?

No, I’d spend it all on fundamental research. There’s some really exciting materials science problems which if you solved them would have benefits far beyond the energy sector, but where you could justify the increased investment just by what it would do to improve energy innovation.

For instance, the wind guys need really strong materials, and they need really good magnets. And if we can do solar chemical8, and somebody figures out how to take the production of photons to hydrocarbons and scale that up by a factor of a hundred so that it becomes economic, that’s pretty miraculous, because you’re creating a liquid hydrocarbon that a lot of our infrastructure, including transport, knows how to deal with today. You’d not be switching out everything except the actually primary generation piece.

“Even though the Paris thing was a big step forward, there is so much work to be done in each country.”

Now, I don’t have a pure mapping of how much you spend on R&D to how quickly you get the breakthrough. As with cancer research, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what scientific possibilities are out there. We don’t have a good equation. You know, it’s possible there’s some guy in a laboratory today who’s inventing something miraculous, but because of climate change and the value of having cheaper energy, we shouldn’t just sit around and hope for his miracle; we should tilt the odds in our favor by doubling the R&D budget.

It’s striking that all of your examples have to do with chemistry and materials science. That’s not a coincidence, is it?

No. Take TerraPower9, the nuclear fission company that I’m very involved with [along with former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold]: all our biggest challenges have been in materials science. We have very high neutron bombardment of our steel plating, and the toughest engineering problem to solve has been proving that over long periods of time we don’t have degradation. But the ability to model materials comes up in almost all energy breakthroughs.

How do you respond to the argument that commercializing inventions like solar paint10 would take far too long to meet the time line of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050? How do you answer the thesis that to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we must deploy the clean technologies we have, while simultaneously investing in more fundamental breakthroughs as well?

For countries that are quite wealthy, like Europe and the United States, we could bear to have energy costs go up even a factor of two in deploying what we have today. It would be a huge political trade-off, and I don’t know if countries would choose to do it, but you wouldn’t be impoverishing anybody.

But look at a country like India, which is paradigmatic and numerically very significant in terms of its expected additions to hydrocarbon use over the next 30 years. If you give Indians the dilemma of electrifying their country using coal or meeting a greenhouse-gas constraint that would dramatically reduce how much electrification gets done, you give them a very tough trade-off. They will ask, “Shouldn’t we save millions of lives? Shouldn’t we give women electric stoves instead of burning wood? Shouldn’t we avoid the environmental degradation all that wood gathering involves, and all the time it demands?” I can’t predict, but I imagine they’ll lean toward electrifying the country, which will mean a global-scale experiment with high carbon dioxide.

So if it wasn’t for technological innovation, I wouldn’t be very optimistic about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But if we have the innovations, then we can say to India, “You can achieve two goals: you can be a great global citizen by not emitting into the atmosphere as much carbon dioxide per person as the rich nations emitted to fuel their growth, and you can electrify your country.”

Won’t progress also require smart policies, including some kind of price on carbon? Wouldn’t we need a carbon tax to help create a business rationale for investing more in clean technologies?

The innovations will need to be encouraged on the supply side and demand side. The supply side is about funding basic government research, and then creating startup companies with that research.