U.S. Technology and Innovation Policies: Lessons for Climate Change
 

Greenhouse gas emission reductions will require a broad portfolio of policies to foster technology development and adoption by actors ranging from households to multinational corporations. The policy portfolio should combine technology policies as discussed in this report with other policies to induce innovation and deployment.

A climate change policy package must account for uncertainties in the pace and cost of innovation. Technological evolution is always accompanied by unknowns concerning the levels of performance that can ultimately be achieved, the technological attributes that will prove most attractive to adopters, and the costs of these technologies. Technical design and development are fluid, open-ended activities with multiple choices and tradeoffs and often-ambiguous selection or evaluative criteria. Uncertainties, part and parcel of innovation, can be resolved only through learning processes. These processes are often slow and piecemeal, studded with lessons from both successes and failures. Technology-oriented policies and non-technology policies alike must function in such settings.

Further lessons for climate change policy include the following:

• Because the benefits of technological innovation come only with widespread adoption, and because adoption and learning are mutually reinforcing processes, the policy portfolio should support diffusion of knowledge and deployment of new technologies as well as research and discovery. In short, R&D alone is not enough.
  
  
• Because private investments respond primarily to near-term market incentives, public investments are necessary to build a technological infrastructure able to support innovation over the long term. A key ingredient of such infrastructures is a vibrant community of technologists and entrepreneurs working in settings in which knowledge and information flow freely. Government financial support for education and training, as well as for research, enhances such infrastructures. Excessively strong intellectual property rights may weaken such infrastructures.
  
  
• Competition among firms contributes to effective selection of innovations, and competition among academic research groups contributes to discovery. Similarly, competition among government agencies and government laboratories contributes to policy success. Competition exposes ineffectual bureaucracies, out-of-touch government laboratories, poor policy choices, and project-level mistakes. It encourages diversity by opening alternatives for exploration by technology creators and technology users alike. For these reasons, policy-makers should channel new funds for R&D through multiple agencies and allocate funds to industry and other researchers on a competitive basis.
  
  
• Because there can be no learning without some failures, policy-makers cannot expect every government investment to pay off. They must be prepared to tolerate mistakes, and to learn from them, just as entrepreneurs in the private sector do. Needless to say, tolerance for error is no excuse for sloppy management or ill-conceived policies and programs.

To encourage innovation in response to climate change, the federal government should support the development of an environment that nourishes creativity and learning in science, technology, and commercial applications. Well-designed technology policies support the free flow of information, which promotes the evaluation of new ideas and the acceptance and diffusion of the best new technologies. Much innovation will be needed if GHG emissions are to be reduced to the levels needed to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases. Government policies will set the underlying conditions for (and constraints on) innovation. The effectiveness of climate change policies will be judged by the innovation that follows. Well-crafted policies can help nourish an energy technology revolution over the next half century as astonishing as the information technology revolution of the last half century.