On the gripping hand, we’re still dumping a boatload of CO2 and other green house gases into the atmosphere. Does the GOP want to lose Florida’s electoral votes to the Atlantic Ocean?
Innovation is great, when innovators do it. When bureaucrats do it, not so much.
Thomas Friedman-types like to cite the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. Those are great as far as they go, but it should be noted that both were extremely expensive and have still not led to widespread commercial application. So if one compares modern attempts to make solar viable with those accomplishments, then we can expect to spend $100 billion for an investment that will pay dividends maybe 100 years down the road.
The idea that we’ll spend a few billion and solar will be the wave of the future by 2020 is nonsense. We’ll know solar has potential when private investors flock to it the way they have with natural gas.
I’d also add that with the space program, the government simply won’t be able to take credit for eventual commercialization of space. The private sector hasn’t been building on what the government developed, they are pretty much starting from scratch as if NASA never existed. You kinda have to when the best NASA can come up with is to send a few guys into space for $80 billion. To do it for a few million doesn’t take just making their technology more efficient, it takes making totally new technology. Which is what the private sector is now attempting to do.
That’s the shuttle, and the cost of the shuttle and its development has to be included, as well as the danger factor. If the shuttle had been privately run,they’d be paying out some serious lawsuit cash. The main advantage of the government is that it need not be accountable when it screws up.
Also, the shuttle is what NASA came up with 25 years after Gemini. I’d bet that the private industry in spacecraft is going to advance a lot further in 25 years, at a fraction of the cost.
Socialists, because they think she might do something about Wall Street hegemony, which they want, and which you don’t have to be a socialist to want. Pat Buchanan wants the same thing.
Hell yeah they’ve led to widespread commercial application! WTF are you talking about?! Spinoffs from both nuclear-fission and space-exploration technologies are countless!
Again, acting like if all the released CO2 in the meantime will not be bad in the long run is folly. You show only show ignorance by not looking at what even conservatives report it should be done.
And most of the spacex projects depend of contracts from NASA, that is tax payer money. And most of the communications still depend on ground control from NASA.
More than $753 million a year is going for the effort (that is not just a few millions, and I do not oppose that project BTW, it is just that it was not also just “a few guys” into space. And the cost you mentioned included huge cargo loads and astronauts for the space shuttle during more than 10 years.
Which is why it’s hogwash to say that free enterprise has done more to solve pollution than government regulation. Natural gas may produce less CO[sub]2[/sub] than coal (and that may be debatable), but that’s not why it has become so popular. We use it because it’s cheaper. If a new energy source is discovered tomorrow that’s cheaper than natural gas, but pollutes more, free enterprise would flock to it (CO[sub]2[/sub] be damned) unless the government gives them a reason not to.
Unless that widget is a rocket, in which case the government widget is stupid and business needs free reign to develop their own.
Gemini flew in 1965 and '66, the shuttle in 1981. (First orbital flight in 1981; drop tests were in 1977.) That’s 15 years. Do you even bother to look this stuff up?
But not commercial space flight. The whole point of green energy investments isn’t to create spinoffs, it’s to have viable green energy. Thus comparisons to the Manhattan project or the space program are invalid. The ambition is actually greater than those programs, and thus the expected payoff is probably lesser, or will take much, much longer and cost far more than our leaders think. Although really I think they are more interested in subsidizing campaign contributors than actually achieving a specific result.
The motive is irrelevant. Markets work despite the players not having the purest of motives. Government, on the other hand, can have the purest motives and yet do horrible things. Or more often, just stupid and ineffective things, like the now 40-year quest to reduce dependent on oil, which I’m sure has only failed because not enough money has been thrown at the problem.
I’m pretty unimpressed with private manned space flight. Their first “space” flight in 2004 was riskier and less impressive (less altitude) than what NASA did in 1961 with the first Mercury flight. Simply saying that private enterprise must always be better and more efficient than government programs is a theology not supported by facts.
The government was willing to throw unlimited funds at the problem and did succeed in their objective, but did not produce commercial space flight. Their attempts to achieve commerical solar or wind power is going to fail as well, for the same reason: being willing to spend lots of money doesn’t mean you get an end product that will compete with fossil fuels.
There’s a giant solar plant being built in Arizona. Amazing accomplishment: too bad it doesn’t produce nearly as much power as a fossil fuel plant. And you get this reduction in power at a higher price. A fantastic technological achievement, and a complete commercial failure.
The motive is entirely relevant to your argument. If lower pollution is an incidental side effect of market forces and pollution levels could just as easily increase again (and more so) as the market changes, then you cannot claim that market forces will inevitably lead to lower pollution.
Sorry - where have you been for the past six or seven years? Well-regulated markets work. Unfettered capitalism is volatile and destructive in its boom-and-bust cycles.
What the government has spent is a pittance compared to what the oil industry has spent to make sure that nothing changes. Let’s not pretend this all happens in a vacuum.
You can’t assume that everything worth doing must necessarily be profitable. If you care only about economics, fossil fuel plants are always going to win. But responsible governments make investments in alternative energy sources that may never be profitable but will reduce carbon emissions. The almighty dollar isn’t everything.
More to the point, the fossil fuel industry offsets a lot of costs onto the taxpayer; specifically, the effects of carbon emissions. If they had to pay for the effects of their pollution (and no, I’m not proposing a plan for this) they’d be a heckuva lot less profitable.
I’m glad we have an economics expert in the thread. What’s your position on emissions trading, Professor? Free market philosophy at its best? Or worst?