"business people" will pretty much only allocate resources to endeavors that are financially profitable for themselves and these same people quite often provide financial incentives to politicians who promise to advocate for policies that result in additional profitability for the business people regardless of the environmental or social consequences. Those elected politicians need to be replaced and the capacity for the "business people" to influence elected officials with financial contributions should be limited and involve mandatory transparency. No more unlimited dark money pools.
Expensive doesn’t mean that somebody is greedy, it means that it takes a lot of effort from a lot of people - effort that could probably be spent more effectively.
If talking about costs bothers you, just think of it in terms of time efficiency. We have a limited number of humans and time available to clean up the planet. What's the most effective way to use them?
As with just about everything else, it's a whole lot easier to build a proof-of-concept prototype than it is to solve the problem at scale. New technologies often have either inherent limitations that make it infeasible for them to scale up (e.g. use of fragile or hard-to-manufacture materials, square-cube issues, outsized cleaning/maintenance requirements) or would simply have a staggering cost at any scale that makes a practical difference.
I mean, this is like the moon landing — private companies can build the technology, but it's not going to get deployed at scale unless a government sponsors it, because there's not a clear path to profit.
And like, is congress going to spend $10B deploying this at scale? That would be great, but they can't even pass a budget.
See also the dramatic groundbreaking new battery technologies that have keep getting reported for the last 30+ years. [1]
Not only is there a long lead time between proof-of-concept and scalable production even in the best case, but frequently these nascent technologies have serious drawbacks that aren't mentioned in the article.
