Why Entrepreneurs Offer the Best Hope as Climate Heroes
Matt Wheeland of Greenbiz.com did a thoughtful Q&A with me about my new book that was posted yesterday. I reproduce the first question and answer below.
Why entrepreneurs offer the best hope as climate heroes
Matthew Wheeland: Why are entrepreneurs the best hope for this scale of carbon reductions – is the policy realm really so bleak?
Jonathan Koomey: We do need policy action to tackle this problem, but to create the game-changing innovations we’ll need, the entrepreneur’s role is critical, and that’s why I chose to focus on that audience.
I’ve been studying climate solutions since the mid 1980s, and it’s been clear since then that this issue would be an important one for humanity, but aside from scattered corporate leadership and regional action (in Europe, California and a few other places) there’s been little progress in making the big shifts that we need to tackle the problem. Over the years I grew frustrated writing detailed technical studies that were only rarely put to use, so I started to turn to what innovative businesses could do to change the debate.
What is also fascinating to me, as someone who’s been working with economic forecasting models for a long time, is that the use of these models in analyzing climate policies enshrines rigidities that don’t exist in the real economy but are instead an artifact of modeling practice.
That means that the policy discussions are hamstrung by modeling exercises that don’t actually reflect what is possible when real entrepreneurial innovation gets rolling (I explore these issues in Chapter 3 and 4 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate). That realization made me want to help create the conditions for rapid innovation instead of studying what might be possible in a less dynamic world.
To read more go to http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/15/koomey-why-entrepreneurs-offer-best-hope-climate-heroes
