Capital, Technology, Policy: The three critical ingredients to prevent climate change

The recent focus on climate change has been the House of Representatives, which is scheduled to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill today (or possibly tomorrow.) But a number of parallel, nonprofit efforts to cut carbon emissions are also ramping up. They include the Clinton Global Initiative, another effort by Richard Branson, and the Gigaton Throwdown , a project of a team of high-powered technology investors and academics that met in Washington Wednesday to share the results of an interesting study. The Gigaton folks want to move much faster and more aggressively to cut global carbon emissions than most people--they want to cut 5 to 7 billion tons (gigatons) of carbon from the atmosphere by 2020, and see the private sector playing a critical role in making this happen. They met to unveil what is essentially a feasibility study for what these ambitious reductions would entail as measured across eight different technologies, including wind, solar, plug-in electric, and--attention Republicans!-- nuclear . The broader goal is to provide a "road map for laboratory-to-industry partnerships."