¹ Suntec's operations are global, but its headquarters are in the Chinese city of Wuxi. Shi's comments are cited in the January 21, 2010 edition of Cosmos.

² Of course, the Times is yet again mistaking America as somehow representative of “the West.” In fact, the Germans and other EU countries have long been using public policy to drive their energy revolutions. That is why Suntech's Shi praises German government leadership in driving a “dramatic increase” in renewable demand.

³ The January 21 2010 edition of The Economist, in an article titled “The Growth of the State: Leviathan Stirs Again,” notes that the state's growth was evident prior to the current crises and is likely to be sustained because of the effects of ageing and etc on public budgets. Big states do not necessarily mean weak economies, as we have learned from Scandinavia and elsewhere. But that positive outcome depends on the quality of public policy and spending programmes.

⁴ One of the foremost experts on this revolution is Martin Jaenicke of the Free University Berlin. A recent interview with him is available here. The main details of the German “3^rd Industrial Revolution” can be found here.

⁵ The internet is a USD 1 trillion business. But venture capitalist John Doerr, noting the Valley's shift to clean tech and the USD 6 trillion energy business, declares that “it could be renamed ‘Solar Valley’ in a decade.” See December 21, 2009 USA Today.

⁶ Even food: on average, it requires ten calories of petrochemical energy, used in fertilizers, power for irrigation, fuel for tractors, and the like, to produce one calorie of food.

⁷ Bernaud Beaudreau, in his Energy and the Rise and Fall of Political Economy (2^nd ed., xiv), points out that “[p]aradoxically, energy and energy-related innovations constitute the primary factor input in the first and second industrial revolutions, they are absent from contemporary political economy.”

⁸ And note the scale that the sector has already achieved. For example, the Renewables Global Status report for 2009 shows that global power from renewables rose 16% over 2007 to reach 280 gigawatts, three times the entire capacity of the US nuclear sector. Moreover, “[m]ore renewable energy than conventional power capacity was added in both the European Union and United States for the first time ever”: link.

⁹ In a further innovation on this policy's coverage of energy types, the UK Government announced on February 2 that its feed-in tariff (slated for introduction on April 1) will include “heat,” as in the use of heat pumps for cooling and heating. The UK has long been a laggard in renewables policy and deployment, seeking to let the market lead rather than shape it, but now its stance has abruptly shifted. And the laggard is clearly using its advantage of backwardness, to innovate beyond what the leaders – such as Germany – have already institutionalized.

¹⁰ With the singular exception of the Korean case, which not surprisingly has

¹¹ The report was released on September 14, 2009, and is available online here.

¹² On the diffusion of the FIT, see “Renewables Global Status Report: 2009 Update,” Paris: REN21 Secretariat: link.

¹³ At its January 17, 2010, conferences of member states, IRENA determined that in 2010 it “will set out to establish itself as the global base for renewable energy knowledge”: link.

¹⁴ Ofgem is the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets. Link.

¹⁵ As late as 2006, Morgan Stanley Research's Robert Feldman was warning that “derivatives are booming around the world. Japanese equities will lose competitiveness unless Japan adapts to global practices (link). Hindsight is of course 20-20, but note that at the time of the Feldman's powerpoint, Goldman Sachs was already starting to short the property bubble, forcing AIG - a true believer in the bubble and derivatives - to pony up more and more collateral until they ran dry and “Helicopter Ben “Bernanke's Federal Reserve Board flew in with the secret funds (”Maiden Lane III“). Now even Goldman Sachs representatives telling the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that some restrictions on derivatives might be in order.

¹⁶ On this, see the WTO's research on global trade and The Wall Street Journal's calculations.

¹⁷ In its March 4, 1999, edition The Economist wrote that oil was going to drop to USD 10/barrel and perhaps even USD 5/barrel. Then in its April 28, 2005 edition it wrote of oil supply as “the bottomless beer mug.”

¹⁸ Seriously. In the Fall 2009 edition of The International Economy, Guy Sorman (“Japan's Road to Harmonious Decline”) writes of how “those lazy Japanese are goofing off again.”

¹⁹ On February 5, the PEW Environment Group reported the results of its study quantifying the costs of Arctic melting. It estimates that the “climate cooling value” lost by the shrinking and thinning of the Arctic ice is already between USD 61 billion and USD 371 billion, and that these costs will rise to USD 2.4 trillion by 2050. Link.

²⁰ See, for example, see UCSD Professor James Hamilton's “Oil Prices and the Economic Downturn” at his home page.

²¹ America is poorly supplied with public transit. And that is especially true in the exurbs and other new communities where subprime lending was concentrated.

²² Note that this “bottom” would have been seen as very high a decade ago.

²³ Since Goldman Sachs trades heavily in derivatives, its projection (which follows warnings from many far more reputable organizations) has the special force of a self-fulfilling prophecy: link.

²⁴ The September 14, 2008 Oil and Gas journal reports that gas and oil pipelines in the US alone total 544,000 kilometres. The infrastructure replacement and construction costs are in the USD millions range per kilometer.

²⁵ The report is in large part available here.

²⁶ The Economist has long derided the “peak oil” debate, but in its December 10, 2009 edition cited the IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol's warning that conventional oil supplies were not likely to keep pace with demand: link. Birol's warning was not new, as he has been pointing out the facts for a couple of years, but it took a while for The Economist to notice.

²⁷ On military spending, see this link.

²⁸ While the nuclear industry argues that it too is clean energy (due to very low greenhouse gas emissions), the health and environmental damage from uranium mining, transport, use and disposal appear, if anything, worse than many have thought. On these adverse effects of the industry, see the 2009 report “Human Health Implications of Uranium Mining and Nuclear Power”: link.

²⁹ See Lind's remarks here.

³⁰ Of course, Saudi Arabia holds the world's largest and low-cost oil reserves. A summary of the announcement is available here.

³⁰ In hydro-electric dams, water runs from the reservoir through turbine blades to generate power. So “pumped-storage” of power is simply a matter of pumping water back into the reservoir. The technology dates from the 1890s, has an efficiency of about 70 to 85 percent, and already has 90 gigawatts of capacity (3 percent of global generation). See Electricity Storage Association.

³¹ See “feed in tariffs go global,” renewable energy world: link.

³² On this, see the aggressive but also very perspicacious writings of Kevin Phillips, especially his 2007 work American Theocracy. Phillips details very well the embedded role of oil (and other fossil fuels, but particularly oil) in the current American political economy.

³³ Or as one astute observer recently put it, the contest may be between “consumer democracy” and “capable governance”: link.

³⁴ And note that this political community includes the center-right governments, who in fact adopted the early versions of the feed-in tariff in 1991 “in response to demands by members in rural southern Germany with access to small, disused hydropower plants.” See Paul Gipe's excellent work on this and related issues: link.

³⁵ The book was published in October 2009 by Earthscan in the UK: link.

³⁶ It may seem odd to describe renewable technologies as in their infancy, as wind and solar have been around for decades. But energy technologies take decades to refine. And as the basic outlines of thin-film solar, concentrated solar, hot-rock geothermal, wave power, and others get established and look increasingly feasible, they attract increasing flows of capital and competition to cut costs. The FIT is thus helping to compress the time scale for energy transition, an extremely important objective considering the multiple crises we confront.

³⁷ And never underestimate the power of this incentive. The US Statue of Liberty nearly was not put in place due to strong opposition from The New York Times and other interests.

³⁸ See, for example, the September 13, 2009, PIPA/BBC poll.

⁴⁰ Contrast this with how willing so many people are to put up with coal mines, coal-fired generating stations and the like in their local and regional communities. These facilities do enormous damage to the environment and public health, but provide some employment and are – more importantly - habituated to.

³⁹ Link.

⁴⁰ Many enthusiasts of distributed power oppose these large-scale projects, apparently worried that they might detract from building local generating capacity and dispersed economic opportunities. But in an era when cooperation in reconfiguring globalization is breaking down (as seen most dispiritingly in Copenhagen), perhaps the benefits of cross-border cooperation give these international projects a special role.

⁴¹ Link.

⁴⁴ One very important potential here is in helping to pull North Korea into the mix. As North Korea experts David Hippel and Peter Hayes argue, North Korea has plenty of renewable resources and developing them would likely help to further link that country's citizens with the outside world (link).

⁴⁵ This is true of oil and gas, less so with coal. Japan's has some reserves of coal, but location and quality make them uncompetitive with imports.

⁴² Link.

⁴³ Link.

⁴⁸ Its introduction last November 1 was a sign that the old LDP-led order had grasped how comparatively weak was Japan's hand in the global race. But the utilities, helped by METI myopia, managed to fight the design of the FIT into a comparatively small box for solar only. This, in a country with the world's third-best geothermal potential.

⁴⁹ One might wonder whether the MOFA's enthusiasm in this regard is at least partly driven by the threat from Washington's vested interests: the US foreign policy elite, especially the Clintonians, appear committed to destroying the Hatoyama Government through fusillades of op-eds that get amped up into missiles when they enter Japan's mediaspace.