The next frontier on the global warming front is becoming less and less likely to be the so called cap and trade initiative. The bill died in the Senate recently and the cost of carbon emissions will remain steadily the same in the future. Not many options are left however to raise the cost of carbon emissions and experts are turning to alternatives and pointing towards the past to highlight where similar major initiatives were not left up to the market but materialized by government push.
…history shows that government-directed research can work. The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced. “We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer.
We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., which is a sponsor of the proposal with A.E.I. and Brookings. “When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere.”
In an attempt to even start by raising the price of fossil fuels, we are incapable of coming to a potential solution and, consequently, have come to looking to bypass the ordeal. In detail, no one is certain of the effectiveness of cap and trade and neither of the alternatives.
It all comes down to implementing all variants which can reduce green house gas emissions. Research, which can lead to an over-the-top wind mill or super photovoltaic materials, should also be employed. However, state participation is already sufficient – with a planned $4 billion budget in the United States alone. I would proposed a kind of diversification where green energy research can be subsidized by the government and, mainly, philanthropically whereby institutions undertake the initial research initiative due to the perputal rising cost of fossil fuel.