The first few minutes of last night's State of the Union Speech were fine. I twitched a little when Obama took partial credit for not boosting taxes the way he really wanted to, but politicians will be politicians. Then the flowery words about innovation, clean energy, and competitiveness started to flow and I stared in awe at the Audacity of Bullshit. I have a better chance of playing Tinkerbell the next time Peter Pan hits Broadway than we have of seeing the future unfold the way President Obama promised last night. I'll explain by way of a conversation I had with my dad this morning.
He watched it last night and came away with reminders of the 1960s and the innovations sparked by NASA and Department of Defense projects back then. He was involved in some of those projects, first in the US Air Force and later in the private sector. I can very much see how last night's speech reminded him of that era when government funding and research led to remarkable innovation and new products. I think there are two important differences between then and now though.
The first is in properly defining what we are trying to accomplish. President Kennedy said that he wanted us to send a man to the moon, but he didn't stop there. He added that bit about returning him safely back to Earth. Now that is obvious from a moral point of view, but strictly from an engineering perspective it changes things enormously. In fact, I bet the vast majority of effort in the space program of the 1960s was dedicated to that last and very important part of the mission.
What does that have to do with last night? This:
So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.
Now I'm all for clean energy, I mean who isn't? But that goal seems to be missing something. Let's add the word "abundant." And since we are talking about Apollo Project levels, let's add the word "cheap" also. There. Now this is a goal I can get behind and one that will position the US to be competitive for a generation:
So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean, abundant, and cheap energy sources.
See? Isn't that much better? We can do clean energy right now. The problem isn't that we don't have it, the problem is we would need to cover huge areas with solar panels and wind farms and we would drive the economy straight into the ground. If the mission is just clean energy we are truly screwed.
The second difference is in how breakthroughs in technology become commercial products and create jobs and grow the economy.
Let's pretend we are at NASA back in 1965. NASA needed a task performed in its mission to send a man to the moon, and back. It had technology A available to it which was also used commercially. It didn't really do the job very well though, so NASA and a contractor worked on developing technology B and man was it slick for NASA's purposes. It was also pretty expensive and while really groovy, it was not really practical from a cost standpoint, so everyone else continued to use technology A until B could be made cheaper. The government did not say that since tech B was really groovy, and groovy is good, we had to subsidize commercial application of tech B so we could be the grooviest country ever. We understood back then that that would be foolish.
When the space program spawned commercially viable innovations there was no need for the government to subsidize their use, entrepreneurs grabbed them and ran.
Today fossil fuels are our tech A while solar and wind are our tech B. There are scales and applications where solar and wind power make a lot of sense, but we are implementing them in areas where it doesn't make any economic sense at all, therefore having taxpayers subsidize the efforts. This is a terrible mistake, not just because we are wasting money, but because it actually removes an incentive to innovate to the point where clean energy is just as cheap as fossil fuels. You just have to get close enough to where the subsidy kicks in. Whoohoo!
I'm all for funding research on clean energy, but such a project must be properly defined to also include our version of "returning him safely to the Earth." Otherwise, it will not create jobs, it will kill them. It will not make us more competitive, it will waste precious government funds and misallocate capital into inefficient and non-viable efforts. In short, it will be a disaster.
We used to know these things. We did.
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