The impacts of budget sequestration are slowly being unveiled to the general public. Furloughs at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) led to air traffic gridlock and angry travelers. Parks and national tourist sites are cutting back hours. And the Department of Defense (DOD) recently announced furloughs for 680,000 civilian employees. While these short-term impacts are painful, in particular to those losing work hours and income, sequestration is initiating cuts with negative, long-term impacts, which are not yet immediately apparent.

One area of specific concern is the potential $381 million in cuts to energy innovation investments at the DOD – a 25 percent cut compared to FY2012 levels. Since 2009, DOD has invested $5 billion in clean energy research, development, testing, demonstration, and procurement, representing almost 25 percent of U.S. clean energy funding in FY2012. DOD’s focus on clean energy innovation is important for three reasons:

• The DOD has been the source of some of the last century’s most important breakthrough technologies, including the Internet, GPS, and microchips and it could have a similar impact on clean energy technologies like batteries and smart grid;
• The DOD has developed its own cohesive

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Yesterday the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on “offshore profits shifting,” with a focus on making Apple and its CEO Tim Cook into the poster child of corporate tax avoidance. As I wrote in The Hill, blame is not a national competitiveness strategy.

But another theme of the event was the seeming unfairness of a situation where domestic multinationals like Apple are not required to pay the full 35 percent tax on their foreign earnings. Despite the fact that we are one of the only nations with a worldwide system of taxation (that requires U.S. multinationals to pay US taxes on foreign earnings when they bring them home), this notion is actually wrong. It is actually in the interest of non-multinational U.S. firms for multinationals to pay less in taxes. Here’s why.

U.S. economic politics is often framed as a clash between “Main Street” and big multinational corporations, with the former salt-of-the earth hard working mom and pop owners and the latter controlled by profit-hungry greedy tycoons. But this framing misses the point that what will determine whether America thrives in the global … Read the rest

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee held an oversight hearing where Committee Members grilled Attorney General Eric Holder on recent controversies. However, lost in the coverage of the heated moments and verbal slip-ups (including Rep. Gohmert’s gem that “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus”), was an excellent exchange between Rep. Mel Watt and the Attorney General on the problem of copyright infringement and online streaming.

During this exchange, the Attorney General notes that the Department of Justice is limited in its ability to prosecute criminal organizations or terrorists who would use illegal online streaming to finance their operations and called on Congress to create stiffer penalties for these violations. Right now, the Department of Justice can only bring up misdemeanor charges for these violations. It’s worth remembering that Congress already tried to fix this loophole once. In 2011, Sen. Klobuchar introduced S. 978 which made it a criminal offense to engage in large-scale, for-profit piracy using online streaming. Opponents of the legislation launched an outlandish (but unfortunately successful) smear campaign in which it accused Sen. Klobuchar of wanting to put Justin Beiber in jail.

If you … Read the rest

Making Innovation Part of Climate Hawks Policy Pitch

In a previous article I argued that climate policy advocates should make energy innovation part of their policy elevator pitch. A good opportunity to start is now available through the debate on reforming and re-authorizing the America COMPETES Act.

Within the climate advocacy community there are those that argue for aggressive clean energy innovation policy (such as myself) and those that argue for aggressive deployment of existing clean energy technologies (such as Center for American Progress’s Joe Romm and 350.org’s Bill McKibben). Each provides different policy emphasis and nuance. Today, deployment policies receive higher priority, reflected in it dominating the narrative among advocates as well as dominating the portfolio of U.S. public investments in clean energy. As a result, conflict occurs over what policy changes should be made.

As Grist’s Dave Roberts argues (correctly to a degree), both “camps” agree on a lot and everyone should aggressively work for clean energy to be a national priority to “lift all boats,”—both innovation and deployment of today’s technologies alike. How then should this consensus be reflected in our pitches to policymakers?

In my … Read the rest

Buried in the President’s FY2014 budget proposal is an interesting reform that could impact energy innovation without relying on Congress for any new – and hard to come by – federal investments. The idea is to create eight new research incubator programs at the Department of Energy that forge collaborations with early-stage start-ups to bring promising new ideas closer to commercial scale. In particular, the incubators would focus on promising technology pathways DOE is not currently investing in.

The incubator programs would be housed within each of the energy technology offices (except for geothermal) and leverage a small share of existing research budgets. The figure below provides the proposed budgets for the new incubators. (Note, the DOE is also continuing its existing solar incubator program.)

Each incubator is expressly aimed at emerging areas of research and technology development not “supported in any meaningful” way by existing DOE projects.

For example, the Vehicle Technologies Program wants to focus on advanced power electronics and electric motor ideas. The Advanced Manufacturing Program wants to invest in “revolutionary” technology pathways that cut energy-use in production, but also make U.S. manufacturers more competitive. And the … Read the rest