You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...
Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.
We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!
But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.
Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.
But... it just feels totally backwards to me!
Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.
Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.
You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...
Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.
We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!
But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.
Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.
But... it just feels totally backwards to me!
Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.
Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.