Q: if this industry is so great, why does it need governmental support?
A: The space industry got billions in government support for years
before it began to make huge contributions to weather prediction,
communication, GPS. The first computers were built for government
applications. The Transistor, laser, micro-circuits and much more came
out of Bell Labs, a sort of R&D mega-university that would only have
existed in the regulated world of the old AT&T. Jet planes were a
product of government military investment. The Internet was a purely
governmental creation, developed as a robust worldwide platform that
happened to be able to support an open networked marketplace while
Microsoft and AOL were developing centralized command and control based
networks.
Sun-based (including wind and hydro) power will succeed
in time even with no support. Solar is largely a product of
semiconductor physics and materials science which have huge momentum if
only more of it would be focused on photovoltaic capture, and we already
see solar power cost-effectiveness growing much much faster then the
GDP. If it takes a decade or two longer for it to make a big impact,
due to lack of gov't support, we will be asking ourselves why we had to
blow up so many mountains, and keep pumping up the accidental and
inordinate powers of Saudi princes, and Venezuala, Russia for those
decades, and maybe fight a couple more avoidable wars, and yes maybe
accidentally transform the climate system in disastrous ways.
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