This week's Analysis presenter, Tim Harford
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BBC Radio 4's Analysis: Inspiring Green Innovation is broadcast on Monday 6 July at 20.30 BST.
Climate change is going to be high on the agenda as the Group of 8 most industrialised nations meet in Italy this week. It will also hit the headlines in a very large way in December when the United Nations Climate Change Summit is held in Copenhagen, Denmark. However, though there is much agreement that something must be done to curtail the changes occurring to our planet, how best to go about nurturing the innovators who will develop necessary technologies, is a subject of much debate. In this week's Analysis Tim Harford asks what is the most efficient way to pick the winners in this field and tries to chart the best path for both governments and the private sector to lead the way. Eric Beinhocker, a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute charts the paths of technology development as an evolutionary process.
How can we inspire more innovation in green technology?
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"Just as evolution creates a lot of variety in the system and some of those variants work better than others then we make more of what works and less of what doesn't - there is a similar process in technology evolution." Even such blunt instruments such as setting a price on carbon have pros and cons to effectively propelling innovation. Suzanne Scotchmer of the University of California, Berkeley "Carbon abatements are a public good and the tricky part is to find a way to allow the innovator who finds a low carbon technology to profit from producing a public good." As this programme finds out, there are many ways to try and chart a cost efficient path to climate change innovation but there is no sure fire way to know which method is the best way forward. There will be no easy solutions to solving the problems of climate change nor, it seems, will there be a smooth path for the success of environmental innovation.
Contributors Eric Beinhocker, Senior Fellow, McKinsey Global Institute Professor Sir David King, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment Cameron Hepburn, Senior Research Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and Director, Climate Bridge James Cameron, Executive Director, Climate Change Capital Mark Williamson, Director of Innovations, Carbon Trust David Rooney, Curator of Technology, London Science Museum Suzanne Scotchmer, Professor, University of California Berkeley and author of "Innovations and Incentives"
Coming up Owen Bennett-Jones asks whether the Pakistani state can survive the current militant challenge.
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