There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out.
I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it.
Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush).
I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.
> There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out.
Obama-era subsidies of clean energy definitely panned out (though solyndra was a failure). Drive from California to Texas some time, and count the windmills. Those were subsidized at about the same time as solyndra.
From what I could tell from reading placards on the sides of the (many) convoys that deliver more on a daily basis, they’re mostly made by GE.
Similarly, rooftop solar was bootstrapped on top of those subsidies (though the Chinese won the panel manufacturing part of that industry, the US did well on battery technology).
Also, this hasn’t been so much a brief push as a sporadic push. The three blade giant windmill design was invented during California’s big wind power push in the early eighties.
I realize that I could have phrased it better. You're totally right that there were successes, I just meant that not all of the investments panned out. But also, that's what investing is: taking a risk.
I find it comical that it's often presented as a giant boondoggle when, as you say, the world is already greener as a result.
I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out.
We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get the test panels a couple weeks later, a FBI lady shooed us away from the parking lot as they were taping the building up.
I think that Solyndra was specifically a terrible choice for the government to make an investment in, but it was exactly the type of industry they should generally be investing in.
But I guess at least Seagate got a nice building out of it.
I think skuhn put this nicely up-thread. There were both successes and misses, and investing is all about taking risks with the understanding not all of them will pan out. Apparently the program was profitable on net.
I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it.
Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush).
I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.