Dan Kammen was interviewed in the article, "A Brighter Tomorrow" by Justin Goldman of Diablo Magazine:
If you want an authority on the future of energy policy, Dan Kammen is your man. He is the director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley, and he served as the first director of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency for the World Bank Group.
Given your expertise in energy, what do you believe our priorities should be moving forward?
As a physicist, my answer reflects what I see as the key long-term issues we must face and also my experience [at] the World Bank Group. … Too much of our economic system is based on taking away from what we do want—innovation and economic growth—and rewarding what we do not or should not want—profits without actually producing anything of value.
Today, we reward companies for wasting energy and other resources, and we inhibit them from investing in worker training and new capacity building. This equation retards not only economic growth, but also keeps our workforce from innovating and improving itself.
Can you explain further how this dynamic works in energy and economic policy?
We are taxing companies that add staff and that work to train them, and crazily we reward companies, through subsidies for fossil fuel and in some cases water use, that use precious resources wastefully. Innovation and investment in a cleaner energy mix need to be rewarded.
We also need to send price signals that make explicit the social and environmental damages from the use of energy products that negatively impact our health, well-being, and the environment.
What sort of policy counters do you recommend?
I would start with a price on greenhouse gas emissions, as California will launch in January 2012, and which the U.S. Northeast, British Columbia, and Europe have to some degree, and which Australia and parts of China are now launching.
Second, we need to reward economic activity that produces more jobs and often better jobs, which is what we have shown, in my laboratory, that investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency do.
Overall, we are mortgaging our future by not investing in research into the technologies, social mechanisms, and the broader cultural understanding that we will need in the future.
“We are mortgaging our future by not investing in research.”