Re:US quits Paris climate pact
by epistasis on Thursday June 01, 2017 @06:29PM
(#14465494)
I respectfully disagree on this. The moon shot was a specific engineering challenge, with a clearly defined goal.
Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes.
This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.
Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes.
This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.