Do all TEA Partiers know science?
And what is “knowing science,” anyway? I know a wee bit about biological sciences, but not electrical engineering.
Sam,
I would disagree that the Volt is dying. It is, EXPENSIVE, and ultimately it was never the solution in the first place. What we have seen is as you have put it a whole revolution with computers and etc in automobiles and trucks squeezing out more energy out of every drop of fuel. With high compression ratios in gasoline engines that normally would have blown themselves up with detonation, and more adoption of the Atkinson cycle engine, followed by something as simple as Mazda offering a KERS type device on its 2014 Mazda 6 which captures braking energy directly into a capacitor bank to run the cars electrical needs, eliminating an alteranator. Innovation solves this problem. The ‘volt’ was just a necessary step. Ultimately, all electrical cars never pass the basic economic test. because the technology is not there yet.
The Volt was not a necessary step towards those other technologies. At best, the Volt was a parallel offshoot. At worst it was a blind alley that drew resources from other, better alternatives. The other technologies you’re talking about were either developed specifically for internal combustion cars or came out of the engineering of traditional hybrids or from other fields entirely.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m a big booster of hybrid power and electric cars in general. But you can’t force technology, trying to do so just diverts creative energy and investment.
I can remember a time about 20-30 years ago when there was a brief flare-up in the idea of driverless cars. At the time, the technological solutions being proposed involved doing things like tearing up highways and embedding wires in them that the cars could follow, because we had no better ideas. It would have been hideously expensive. It’s a good thing the government didn’t decide that the time was right to ‘invest’ in that with mandates and subsidies, or we’d have a bunch of useless wire-guided roads today and the developments that came later that are leading to actual useful driverless cars might never have happened.
Likewise, just how much damage has the push for ethanol caused, both to the environment and to the effort to find ways to use less gas in cars? How many engineers and how many billions of dollars were diverted into what looks like a failed quest for hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars after the Bush administration decided to make it a priority?
Technology advances not through directed ‘pushes’ in specific directions. It advances evolutionary like an ecosystem. ‘Breakthroughs’ happen only when the substrate of enabling technologies develops to the point where it’s possible and cost-effective, and then those breakthroughs tend to happen pretty much instantly. Powered flight didn’t happen until a number of enabling technologies became available, and once they were there, powered flight was inevitable. Had the Wright Brothers decided to stay with bicycles, someone else would have been flying powered airplanes within a very few years.
That’s why some of us keep saying that government has to stay out of the business of picking winners and losers and actively directing technological research. Instead, it should ensure that the market works efficiently (even if that means taxing products that generate externalities), and helping to create a fertile environment for science in general.
Exactly right. You need look no further than the ethanol, solar and wind subsidy programs. They are all costing us a bundle and are little more than payoffs to political special interests.
Support for ethanol ain’t what it used to be (warning: HuffPo).
If you throw enough money at something, you’re bound to get some serendipitous results such as with the space program, but it’s a fallacy to use those as a primary justification for those programs. That’s just the way research works. Whenever you try to do something new you tend to stumble on other new things, some of which may end up being beneficial. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that will always happen and it definitely doesn’t mean that whatever you discover will ever come close to justifying the costs of the program in the absence of it’s success in its primary mission.