Not only are we known for tech breakthroughs, but this is how they happen. That is, people first have to be working on problems, trying (and mostly failing) to get things to work, in order to make those breakthroughs.
That's been my ongoing frustration with climate tech.
Problems need to feel urgent enough to gain sustainable support from society, but climate change doesn't feel urgent, despite it being a five alarm fire relative to the last few millennia.
I suspect we won't get serious about breakthroughs until 2100 or so. Fingers crossed for fusion.
For what it's worth, I get where you're coming from on this in theory, but in practice I don't think this thesis has been borne out.
If this were right, we wouldn't have solar power scaling up by hundreds of gigawatts per year, or the EV and charging network deployment we're currently seeing, or a bunch of recent progress on geothermal power, electrolysis, and heat pumps (including for industrial heat).
I'm not sure which part of your thesis is wrong though. Maybe people do feel sufficient urgency to work on all this? Or maybe people are actually capable of working on things without needing a "five alarm fire" to motivate them. I tend think it's the latter, personally.
Yeah! I think breakthroughs are also sometimes ... more boring than people expect?
Like, there isn't really an "invention of the transformer" singular breakthrough moment for lithium ion batteries. But there absolutely is a breakthrough-level difference in battery technology between, say, the 90s and today.
Maybe battery nerds would say there were breakthrough moments like that, but when I read The Powerhouse (Steve Levine), which is about some of these developments, I came away surprised and impressed by how incremental but consistent the progress was.
Same thing with solar panels. We figured out how to do PV in the middle of the 20th century, but it didn't really work until recently, after tons of "boring" incremental progress on it.
