Who knew that these two morons, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, were nothing but corpoRATS looking for industry cash in return for delaying any government action on GHG climate disaster?  Me.  That's who. 

 They said environmentalism was dead awhile  back.  And it turns out, bushco industries liked that so much, that they raked in the cash to start this think tank.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/2/1825/47971/#comment2

I read through some of the interviews with the fine fellows at the Breakthrough Institute.  Mostly theory laden obsfucation as far as I can decipher.

But I did find some actual information in this interview with Hoffert:

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/04/post_1.shtml

Lindsay Meisel: "How feasible is space solar power? What role can it play in the solution?"

Hoffert: "I think it's a promising source of energy, but not the first thing we should do. In the long term, we need solar energy or nuclear fusion, because we're going to use up all the fossil fuels."

  Space solar, ridiculous diversion.  Fusion, pie in the sky.  We will destroy the human friendly climate long before fossil fuels run out.  We need solar because of that.

Hoffert: "The problem with solar is how to match supply and demand - that requires transmission and storage on massive scale by technologies that we don't really have."

Completely false.  Excel is building out a 1000 home smart grid in Colorado right now.  Studies of only eight wind farms, that Gar has cited here, have proven that very little storage is actually needed.  Smart grid technology stores energy as low temperature heat or cold in buildings and appliances.  

A distributed smart grid actually reduces the need for transmission so much that the present grid has 5 times the capacity needed.  Conservation with geo heat exchange heating/cooling alone can vastly reduce power demand.

Hoffert on china building coal plants:  "The only thing we can do is to try to offer them an alternative, and right now we don't have one. We don't have anything cost effective."

Complete nonsense.  Wind is cheaper than coal, so is solar furnace technology.  Both are well proven and seeing large investment.

Even the more expensive solar PV has just gone to cogeneration.  In a recent solar building competition the winning team used something they called PVT (photo voltaic temperature) which I have called solar cogeneration for the last few years.  Generating electricity and heat from the same solar panels.

With a 10 cent per kwh subsidy, diverted from fossil, nuclear, and agribizz fuel farming subsidies, solar cogeneration on a home or business will pay off in a few short years.

Farm biogas will do the same, and it produces a storable energy source for smart grid backup.  Used with solid oxide fuel cell/turbines (70% efficient and in use at several breweries right now, running off biogas from waste)as distributed generation it makes the grid immune to the widespread power blackouts of centralized grids.

Furthermore biogas digestion also produces organic fertilizer that replaces fossil fertilizer, revives chemically dead soil as a carbon sink, and prevent fertilizer and manure run off that produces huge amounts of methane, a very potent GHG (21 times worse than CO2).  mechanized organic agriculture has all these sources of gHG savings together as well as producing clean backup power for the grid.  germany is investing heavily in a smart grid with wind, solar, and biogas.

Maybe these "Breakthrough" fellers ought to read this blog?  Just a suggestion.  We have all the technology we need, give us 10 cents per kwh and it will be done in the next 20 years.  Maybe in the nick of time?  That ice is melting very fast!

I have to agree cap and trade is a disaster waiting for hedge funds to happen.  But a subsidy diversion?  now that will work, you will see a WW 2 like production effort driven by a gold rush into alternative energy.  

Oh yeah and don't forget plugin hybrids, a nice design is now available from Audi.  And Toyota has a plugin hybrid hypercar in the works.  

Oh and I forgot wave and ocean and river current power generation too.