I read a nice exposition of the changes that will be necessary to make if we’re going to refashion our entire energy system in the Winter 2009 edition of Issues in Science and Technology. Frank Laird, a University of Colorado-Denver professor, authored it. He lays out the reasonable, 30,000-foot steps that we can take to overcome the current system’s technological momentum.

Momentum is a key idea. It helps explain why so many things that seem like good ideas (energy efficiency, for example) don’t go anywhere. Here’s the key quote from Laird on the topic:

The existing energy system includes economic institutions such as banks and capital markets that know how to evaluate an energy firm’s financial status and are knowledgeable about prices. Politically, the system requires such measures as technical standards for a range of items, such as voltage and octane, as well as regulatory rules and structures for environmental protection and worker health and safety. At the social level, the system needs people with diverse skills to operate it, as well as university departments to train these workers and associations to promote their professional growth. Also needed are institutions that can interact successfully with the many populations affected by energy developments.

Along every dimension, the size of the existing energy system almost defies imagination, creating what historian Thomas P. Hughes characterizes as the system’s momentum, the extent to which it resists change. Most obviously, the system moves and processes huge quantities of various fuels and in so doing generates trillions of dollars of revenues worldwide. The many institutions in the system have created well-established norms, rules, and practices, which also resist change. The individuals in the many professions that make the system work have, in addition to their incomes, their identities linked to the existing system, which system change would put at risk. Changing this large, deeply entrenched system will take time, major shifts in incentives, and considerable political and business effort.

In short, a new system doesn’t just have to be as good, it has to be better or new people have to be injected into the system with a different set of values. To a certain extent, I think this is what is happening with the rise of green venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

The problem, though, is that many of these financially-motivated greens don’t have a firm base in the history of the environment or environmental politics or even energy systems, let alone any specific knowledge about green technologies. They don’t know what’s been tried or that’s worked. Not that they should be forced to live within the history’s guidelines but it might be useful to know it.