In the face of escalating climate change concerns, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has taken proactive steps to accelerate innovation in climate-related technologies. The Climate Change Mitigation Pilot Program (CCMPP), implemented in 2022, aims to fast-track the examination of patent applications for inventions designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The CCMPP represents a laudable effort to incentivize and prioritize climate-focused innovations. By expediting the patent process for these technologies, the USPTO hopes to stimulate rapid advancements in the fight against climate change.
The USPTO, like many government agencies, operates under strict budgetary constraints and limited resources. Allocating additional resources to non-climate-related patents necessarily means diverting them from other areas of the patent system. By prioritizing climate-related patents, the USPTO risks extending wait times for other types of innovations or potentially compromising the thoroughness of their examinations. The plan would reverse this.
This disadvantage takes on particular gravity when considered in the context of climate change as an existential threat. Many scientists and security experts warn that we are approaching—or may have already crossed—critical tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. These tipping points represent thresholds beyond which changes become self-reinforcing and potentially irreversible on human timescales.
In light of these existential risks, any action that could potentially slow down overall technological progress to combate clima change —even if well-intentioned—must be carefully scrutinized. The USPTO tradeoff disadvantage argues that by focusing too narrowly on climate-specific innovations, we may inadvertently hamper our ability to develop the diverse range of technologies needed to address the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change.
Moreover, the non-linear nature of climate change impacts adds another layer of complexity to this issue. Traditional risk assessment models often fail to capture the full range of potential outcomes, particularly the low-probability, high-impact events that lurk in the “fat tails” of probability distributions. These outlier events could have consequences so severe that they threaten the very fabric of human civilization.