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Third, there is also a current crisis in patent quality. If the USPTO irresponsibly grants substandard patents, then these patents are also costly to the economy. London Economics performed an analysis on patent backlogs throughout the world and estimated that granting substandard patents can cost up to $21 billion per year in economic losses in the United States alone; these losses result from "deterring valid research and having an additional deadweight loss from litigation and administrative costs of $ 4.5 billion annually." 46

Furthermore, there have been significant problems with patent quality in the past. Many within patent law are skeptical of the current trajectory of the USPTO in issuing defensible and appropriately protective patents. 47 This issue was so great that former Director Lee of the USPTO even released an op-ed piece published by Law360 to discuss the issue, stating:

Americans’ litigiousness and thirst for massive damages has been a boon to the legal profession. But some researchers and litigation experts warn that the abundance of lawsuits—many of them frivolous—flooding U.S. courts is severely weakening the economy. According to consulting firm Towers Watson, the direct cost of the U.S. tort system in 2009 was approximately $250 billion, which was roughly 2 percent of the gross domestic product. The amount is double the estimated tort expenses in other countries, including the U.K. and Japan. In May, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing that explored excessive litigation’s effect on the United States’ global competitiveness. During his testimony, Skadden Partner John Beisner explained that plaintiffs counsel engage in five types of litigation abuse that ultimately undermine economic growth: improperly recruiting plaintiffs, importing foreign claims, filing suits that piggyback off government investigations and actions, pursuing aggregate litigation and seeking third-party litigation financing. “America’s litigious nature has caused serious damage to our country’s productivity and innovation. … The root cause is that we have created incentives to sue—and to invest in litigation—instead of establishing disincentives for invoking judicial process unless absolutely necessary. Other countries discourage litigation; we nurture it,” Beisner said at the hearing.

Long delays in the resolution of court cases are a common problem in both developing and developed countries and impede anti-corruption efforts. Technical solutions such as hiring more judges and reforming cumbersome procedures, when used alone, have proved ineffective. Political economy analysis can reveal how the interests and incentives of judges, lawyers, clerks, and litigants interact to create delays, providing a basis for more effective reforms. But the success of such reforms depends on support from senior judges and pressure from civil society.

Prevalence and consequences of court delay

The world as we knew it changed forever at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, precipitating a seismic shift in the legal industry, particularly in the conduct of court proceedings. The closure of businesses, restaurants, schools and government facilities rendered the in-person style of court hearings that we all knew as the normative practice no longer feasible.

Swift Adaptations in Response to Crisis

2023 was an eventful year for the patent world. The USPTO sought comments on the ANPRM and Patent Eligibility Restoration Act. The Unified Patent Court (UPC) launched. Pressure mounted in the EU to create a SEP commission. Despite the implemented changes or those proposed, litigation levels remained constant. IP Edge continues to be notably absent, but others, like Jeffrey M. Gross and Intellectual Ventures, have increased their assertions.

Highlights:

If the headlines are to be believed, every aspect of American life, from  to , is under threat due to excessive patent litigation. While these anecdotes may seem compelling, it is important to look at the underlying data before drawing any conclusions about the state of the U.S. patent system. As an economist and one of the authors of the Federal Trade Commission’s  (PAEs), I understand the value data can bring to patent policy debates, and have also seen firsthand the damage evidence-free policymaking has on America’s innovation ecosystem. On World IP Day, Marcum, LLP, a leading accounting and advisory firm, released a  that examines 20 years of patent infringement decisions at U.S. district courts. A careful reading of their report reveals that not only is patent litigation not excessive, but patent owners struggle to enforce their patents against infringers. The report shows that overall patent litigation is declining, injunction grants are low, and litigation by non-practicing entities (NPEs) is not pervasive.

Patent Litigation Is Declining

During 2022, state courts handled 64.6 million incoming cases, which is a 2% increase over the previous year. However, when compared to the total number of cases in 2019 (83.2 million), there was a decline of 18.7 million cases.

“While there has been a gradual recovery from the unprecedented decline in state court filings since 2019, some case types, such as delinquency and traffic, remain well below the pre-pandemic caseload levels,” said Nicole Waters, NCSC’s Director of Research and Design.

There were fewer patent suits filed in 2023 than in any year for over a decade, a drop that attorneys attribute to wariness among some patent litigants due to funding disclosure rules in one prominent patent venue and changes in how cases are assigned to judges in another.

A total of 3,111 patent lawsuits were brought in U.S. district courts last year, a 19% drop from the 3,839 in 2022 and the fewest in any year since 2010, . From 2017 to 2022, between 3,500 and 4,000 suits were filed each year.

The federal courts recognize that "invalid" patents exist, and dispose of these based on the evidence--quickly sometimes by summary judgment if there is no material fact in dispute. If a patent owner knowingly attempts to enforce an invalid patent, the court will impose penalties. The courts, however, do not recognize "bad" patents, which are creations of lobbyists. Since only about 3000 patent lawsuits are filed annually (only a couple hundred or so going to trial each year), there isn't any "torrent" of patent litigation clogging the federal courts. In fact, the federal courts are constantly modifying our patent system so that it is fair to all litigants as several recent cases attest, including the 2007 Supreme Court decision making the non-obvious test more difficult to pass. (KSR International vs. Teleflex 550 U. S. 398.)

In this modern dynamic world, innovation coupled with entrepreneurship plays an important part in the field of economic development. In the view of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, "carrying out innovations is the only function which is fundamental in history" (Sledzic p. 89). The historical development of industrialisation was the outcome of growing capital due to the greater prosperity of the western nations. Technological change and innovations were perceived as the guarantee for 'social welfare in general (Gries et al. 2017 in Sazarukki). The capital was used to replace labour with technology for increased production. This increase in industrialisation led to a substantial increase in demand for natural resources. New technologies were being used in introducing these nova industrial processes, which required more energy. With the passage of time, innovations started to swarm upon modern societies, and there began a capitalistic marathon to grab consumers to achieve materialistic gains by providing them with innovative industrial processes and productions. The consequences of these kinds of developments were hazardous in their effect. These activities not only brought about a sudden decrease in natural resources but also polluted the environment on the whole. The modern industrial revolutions generated a new political-economic system labelled as the "treadmill of production" (Schnaiberg 1980b; Schnaiberg & Gould 1994). This political-economic system runs over the rail of expanding industrial production and increasing consumption, as well as the politicised public confluence of private capital, labour, and governments, which is involved in promoting this goal. A remarkable increase in production generated opportunities for further employment, and the service sector seemed to grow more rapidly. Finally, states and their government apparatus increasingly shared a stake and created possibilities to expand the private sector in economic terms. Following these interests and beliefs, private capital, labour, and state interests represented a powerful political force, accelerating the treadmill of industrial production. This industrial process demanded raw material inputs extracted from the ecosystem and added wastes as the by-products of outputs to the ecosystems (pp. 5-6). Thus greater mechanisation resulted in creating more pollution problems. Moreover, intensive capital requires greater material input and demands more energy to run machinery, so a higher level of withdrawal from ecosystems is required. Industrial factories use more chemicals in the production process, adding pollution to the ecosystem. This article manipulates the innovation theory of Joseph. A. Schumpeter, describes the production process under the guise of economic well-being and environmental sociologist Allan Schnaiberg’s theory of treadmill of production forms the argument that production process and overconsumption contribute to environmental pollution and instabilities. The treadmill or production process consists of Stakeholders (workers and citizens) and shareholders (investors and managers). They keep themselves indulged in this process of the treadmill and continue contributing to environmental pollution.

Cluster B displays significant growth in the number of publications per year, compared to the other clusters. Most of the articles of this cluster have a meso-level unit of analysis and examine socio-technical systems (e.g. electricity, agro-food, transportation, etc.) These works address the unintended and harmful effects of innovation and investigate the complex interactions between the biophysical, social, economic and institutional factors resulting from the introduction of an innovation in the current socio-technical system. These studies tend to emphasise the directionality of transitions, arguing that innovations can have a tendency to develop in unsustainable ways. For instance, in an ethnographic study of Danish households, Røpke, Christensen, and Jensen (2010) explore unsustainable patterns of consumption of ICT. The study shows that the energy that is consumed by these technologies (including the most energy efficient ones) keeps increasing with their incorporation in everyday social practices. As a result, the energy reductions derived from more efficient technologies are outweighed by the energy consumption of ICT in households. In a study of the agricultural system, Wigboldus et al. (2016) investigate the scaling of agricultural-improving technologies such as disease-resistant seeds, permaculture cultivation practices and automated milking systems. They show how the scaling up of these technologies may pose a series of undesirable effects such as unanticipated environmental degradation effects, poor farm worker labour conditions and loss of control by farming communities over seeds. For example, pesticides give positive economic returns in the short run, but generate negative externalities in the form of environmental degradation and adverse impacts on human health. The adoption of these detrimental innovations is ascribed (mostly) to the fact that the agricultural system became locked into a path-dependent production model which has developed along a direction that it is difficult to change despite its being environmentally and socially unsustainable. Of particular interest is that the research in this cluster, stresses that, in some cases, even innovations designed to contribute positively to the environment – see, e.g. improvements to materials and improved energy efficiency in buildings – may cause significant unintended negative impacts on society, including greater consumption and increased waste and pollution, giving rise to the so-called ‘rebound (or take-back) effect’ (Frondel 2004; Herring 2004). Herring and Roy (2007) study is a fitting example of this. They examine the rebound effect in an empirical study focused on the factors that influence consumers’ adoption of low and zero carbon technologies. They show that adopting energy-efficient technologies can result in reduced energy consumption, in the short term, of between 10% and 20%; however, this positive effect is soon outweighed by rising levels of consumption. Rebound effects are observed, also, in the transportation system, as noted by Wang, Zhou, and Zhou (2012), who investigate the direct rebound effect for passenger transport in China in the period 2002–2007 and show that energysaving transport systems reduce transport costs, but that the energy reductions are offset by increased demand for public transport due to its lower costs.

Another issue is related to the `North-South' perspective. Rich countries develop new innovations that are applied across the world, then the rich countries notice that these innovations are toxic or harmful, and either move on to better alternatives or develop infrastructures to deal with the waste or simply export their waste (e.g. electronic waste). Poor countries, on the other hand, may not have the institutional structures in place to enable them to contain the problems. Most academic research on innovation focuses on its production in R&D intensive sectors in rich nations. But this is a very misleading view of innovation. For most people, in most countries, for most of history, innovation is not something that was developed where they live to address their problems. Innovation is, instead, something that happens in other places, is adapted to the institutions and culture of those places and comes from those places. Its arrival can be very disruptive because it may not necessarily fit with the local environment, and the changes that are required can be experienced as an imposition. In this spirit, Hansen and Nygaard (this issue) discuss the problem of solar waste in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is an interesting issue for public policy and normative social science about how the downsides of innovation are socially distributed both internationally and within nations.

The ‘innovate or die’ mantra has indisputably dominated Science and Technology (S&T) policy in the last decades of the 20th as well as the beginning of the 21st century (Pansera and Fressoli, 2021). Under this mantra innovation is generally seen as neutral, apolitical, and inevitable; a necessity for any type of progress and prosperity. It is often supported and underpinned by an almost religious faith in progress that crystalised into technological determinism and productivism. The first sees technical change as inevitable, the latter considers innovation always good and desirable. This interpretation of innovation is in many ways connected to the role of technical change in industrialised capitalist societies. A role condensed in Schumpeter’s concept of Creative Destruction, an idea borrowed from Sombart’s (1913) War and Capitalism (Reinert and Reinert, 2006). In the 1930s Schumpeter (1934) argued that one of the main drivers of capital accumulation is technological change (incl. innovation), which continuously revolutionises the way goods and services are produced and delivered, introducing dynamism and instability into the context of a competitive free market economy. Shortly after, i.e. in the decades following World War II, the endless pursuit of economic growth became one of the core economic and political goals (Dale, 2012). Hence, the interpretation of innovation anchored in the concept of Creative Destruction, coupled with the systemic application of science for the development and expansion of market economies, has helped produce an unprecedented era of economic as well as material growth.

The pursuit of endless economic growth and expansion has been ecologically problematised as early as the 1970s (see Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972). For a breadth of scholars (see e.g. Daly and Farley, 2011; Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Spash, 2017; Victor, 2008) the ever increasing use of materials and resources is the reason for climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, and other types of ecological degradation. Humankind faces unprecedented changes due to its increasing material throughput that ignores the biophysical limits of our planet (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014; Rockstrom ¨ et al., 2009). It therefore begs the question why an interpretation of innovation based on Creative Destruction with the purpose of endless expansion persists? These mainstream interpretations of innovation can be interpreted as actively propelling climate change and other ecological degradation further undermining a sustainable future on this planet. In this paper we therefore argue that the seemingly neutral view of innovation as a necessary driver of economic growth and thus prosperity has not only become obsolete, but also represents a noxious and dangerous compass guiding S&T policy.

But ten years after the UK government first announced a £1 billion competition to design CCS, we’re not much further forward. The reason is summed up by the geologist Lord Oxburgh in his contribution to the government-commissioned report on CCS published last year:

There is no serious commercial incentive and it will stay that way unless the state demonstrates there is a business there.

A breakthrough invention in science often stimulates exuberant assumptions that shortcuts in the process of technology adoption are available. But they rarely are. The research community on carbon dioxide removal may be proceeding down a path of wishful thinking that the brilliance of the ideas behind this research will inherently create adopters and users. A revealing point is that in many studies and news articles, these technologies will be “deployed.” Only rarely do we read about people “adopting” them. This top-down orientation, using military language, is bound to run into problems, especially at the massive scales involved.

Consider the experience of arguably the most dynamic low-carbon innovation so far, solar photovoltaic panels. It took 60 years after the first commercial use, the Vanguard-1 satellite in 1957, to get to the current state where solar beats coal and gas on cost in sunny places. By the 2030s, more than 10 percent of global energy supply is expected to come from solar. The first commercial direct CO2 air capture system came online last year. If air capture is to follow a similar timeline to solar, it will be low cost in 2077 and attain widespread adoption by 2100. That is far too late.

CCS has increasingly been seen as expensive and uncertain – the UK abandoned its £1 bn CCS power plant competition in 2015. It’s the same elsewhere. The flagship US Kemper coal CCS project has been halted. Norway, a CCS pioneer with its enhanced oil recovery technology, has now cut its CCS funding. Some work on CCS is still continuing, and there are around 17 projects running worldwide, although all but two of them are industrial gas processing or chemical plants, not power plants, and only four have dedicated geological CO2 storage. While CCS may have some important industrial applications, as far as the power sector is concerned the overall message seems to be that for the moment it is “game over” for CCS, in the EU especially, with renewables offering a cheaper option.

One proposed method for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere—and reducing the risk of climate change—is to capture carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place. However, research from Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University, published in Energy and Environmental Science, suggests that carbon capture technologies can cause more harm than good. "All sorts of scenarios have been developed under the assumption that carbon capture actually reduces substantial amounts of carbon. However, this research finds that it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution," said Jacobson, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "Even if you have 100 percent capture from the capture equipment, it is still worse, from a social cost perspective, than replacing a coal or gas plant with a wind farm because carbon capture never reduces air pollution and always has a capture equipment cost. Wind replacing fossil fuels always reduces air pollution and never has a capture equipment cost." Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, examined public data from a coal with carbon capture electric power plant and a plant that removes carbon from the air directly. In both cases, electricity to run the carbon capture came from natural gas. He calculated the net CO2 reduction and total cost of the carbon capture process in each case, accounting for the electricity needed to run the carbon capture equipment, the combustion and upstream emissions resulting from that electricity, and, in the case of the coal plant, its upstream emissions. (Upstream emissions are emissions, including from leaks and combustion, from mining and transporting a fuel such as coal or natural gas.) Common estimates of carbon capture technologies—which only look at the carbon captured from energy production at a fossil fuel plant itself and not upstream emissions—say carbon capture can remediate 85-90 percent of carbon emissions. Once Jacobson calculated all the emissions associated with these plants that could contribute to global warming, he converted them to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide in order to compare his data with the standard estimate. He found that in both cases the equipment captured the equivalent of only 10-11 percent of the emissions they produced, averaged over 20 years. This research also looked at the social cost of carbon capture—including air pollution, potential health problems, economic costs and overall contributions to climate change—and concluded that those are always similar to or higher than operating a fossil fuel plant without carbon capture and higher than not capturing carbon from the air at all. Even when the capture equipment is powered by renewable electricity, Jacobson concluded that it is always better to use the renewable electricity instead to replace coal or natural gas electricity or to do nothing, from a social cost perspective. Given this analysis, Jacobson argued that the best solution is to instead focus on renewable options, such as wind or solar, replacing fossil fuels. Efficiency and upstream emissions This research is based on data from two real carbon capture plants, which both run on natural gas. The first is a coal plant with carbon capture equipment. The second plant is not attached to any energy-producing counterpart. Instead, it pulls existing carbon dioxide from the air using a chemical process. Jacobson examined several scenarios to determine the actual and possible efficiencies of these two kinds of plants, including what would happen if the carbon capture technologies were run with renewable electricity rather than natural gas, and if the same amount of renewable electricity required to run the equipment were instead used to replace coal plant electricity. While the standard estimate for the efficiency of carbon capture technologies is 85-90 percent, neither of these plants met that expectation. Even without accounting for upstream emissions, the equipment associated with the coal plant was only 55.4 percent efficient over 6 months, on average. With the upstream emissions included, Jacobson found that, on average over 20 years, the equipment captured only 10-11 percent of the total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that it and the coal plant contributed. The air capture plant was also only 10-11 percent efficient, on average over 20 years, once Jacobson took into consideration its upstream emissions and the uncaptured and upstream emissions that came from operating the plant on natural gas. Due to the high energy needs of carbon capture equipment, Jacobson concluded that the social cost of coal with carbon capture powered by natural gas was about 24 percent higher, over 20 years, than the coal without carbon capture. If the natural gas at that same plant were replaced with wind power, the social cost would still exceed that of doing nothing. Only when wind replaced coal itself did social costs decrease. For both types of plants this suggests that, even if carbon capture equipment is able to capture 100 percent of the carbon it is designed to offset, the cost of manufacturing and running the equipment plus the cost of the air pollution it continues to allow or increases makes it less efficient than using those same resources to create renewable energy plants replacing coal or gas directly. "Not only does carbon capture hardly work at existing plants, but there's no way it can actually improve to be better than replacing coal or gas with wind or solar directly," said Jacobson. "The latter will always be better, no matter what, in terms of the social cost. You can't just ignore health costs or climate costs." This study did not consider what happens to carbon dioxide after it is captured but Jacobson suggests that most applications today, which are for industrial use, result in additional leakage of carbon dioxide back into the air. Focusing on renewables People propose that carbon capture could be useful in the future, even after we have stopped burning fossil fuels, to lower atmospheric carbon levels. Even assuming these technologies run on renewables, Jacobson maintains that the smarter investment is in options that are currently disconnected from the fossil fuel industry, such as reforestation—a natural version of air capture—and other forms of climate change solutions focused on eliminating other sources of emissions and pollution. These include reducing biomass burning, and reducing halogen, nitrous oxide and methane emissions. "There is a lot of reliance on carbon capture in theoretical modeling, and by focusing on that as even a possibility, that diverts resources away from real solutions," said Jacobson. "It gives people hope that you can keep fossil fuel power plants alive. It delays action. In fact, carbon capture and direct air capture are always opportunity costs."

Over 100,000 tonnes of pharmaceutical products are consumed globally every year (24% in Europe). During their manufacture, use and disposal, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) as well as other chemical ingredients are released into the environment.

A very substantial share of pharmaceutical production now takes place overseas. This is particularly the case for antibiotics and other generic medicines. China produces 80-90% of antibiotic APIs and Indian companies lead the production of finished dose products. There have been numerous high-profile pollution scandals at antibiotics production sites in both China and India, resulting in the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. Possible downstream pollution from manufacturing plants has been observed in the EU and other parts of the world.

The negative impact of the production of pharmaceutical products on the natural environment is well known. However, this remains largely unregulated, meaning the extremely toxic impact it has on both animals and humans continues with no clear end in sight.

Over the past 30 years, international organisations and the pharmaceutical industry have begun to notice that the detrimental impact pharma products have on the environment on a global scale.

In Puerto Rico, cheap labor and generous tax breaks—since 2017, more than $100 billion worth—have made US-based pharmaceutical firms the biggest economic players in town. Drug manufacturers have brought in tens of thousands of jobs, albeit with a tax-break price tag of more than $1 million each. But a new report by the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and advocacy group Hedge Clippers suggests that Big Pharma’s footprint on the island has come with other serious costs: illegal dumping of toxic waste, pollution and depletion of groundwater, and violations of other vital Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The report, released Tuesday, paints a disturbing picture, holding US pharmaceutical corporations at least partially responsible for Puerto Rico’s disproportionately high rates of asthma and cancer. The sum of its findings: a pattern of environmental racism resulting in more than a dozen Big Pharma–related Superfund sites, with the complicity of federal and local authorities.

Puerto Rico is home to some 500 EPA-designated, toxin-packed Superfund sites, half of which were “active” as of July, meaning they pose an ongoing risk to the surrounding communities and ecosystems. Eighteen of its active sites are on the EPA’s “national priorities list,” which tracks areas most likely to release harmful compounds; of those, 15 are linked to the pharmaceutical industry. And Superfund sites don’t include every area where industries have improperly disposed of hazardous waste—just the most serious health and environmental threats.