Quote Originally Posted by mcatdog
Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
Another note on clean, renewable energy: like I said, we have the tech already, but we also have super advanced theory which we have yet to fully understand and engineer due to lack of funds. If the US govt put 100 billion $$$/month into researching this theory and developing current tech, we would be carbon neutral in just a decade or so, and would be pretty close to or already implementing nuclear fusion (holy grail of energy)
You don't know that. There are a lot of possible alternatives to fossil fuels and no one knows which one our economy will eventually depend on. The US government should promote research into many different options, not just decide that one of them (i.e. nuclear fusion) is the future and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on what might be a dead end. Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse by always complaining about the ethanol rule, but this is what happens when the government decides to force a technology on people in large quantities before it's ready. We're wasting billions of dollars, increasing the price of food which makes people poorer all over the world, and we're not even increasing our energy efficiency or reducing our carbon footprint! The 10% ethanol requirement is one of the worst policies the US has (and that's saying a lot), it benefits no one other than corn growers and a few big corporations.

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2194

Also when you mention people like Galileo or Jonas Salk who made miraculous discoveries essentially on their own, doesn't that contradict the idea that scientific genius can be dictated from above by spending hundreds of billions of dollars? Science progresses in ways no one can predict.
Yes, the ethanol business is garbage. I don't know much about it, but I speculate that the details would show that there was much more going on with regards to special interests with that.

What I was getting at wasn't just putting money into one thing. No serious scientist/engineer who understands this stuff even suggests that. Read the synopsis in MacKay's book. He details how UK can go completely clean and renewable with simply current technology (and does this by using a whole plethora of different methods). My comments about nuclear fusion were sort of a side point. While it is indeed the holy grail of energy, we don't know yet if we could ever engineer it up to par. However, we think that that is very likely, but we simply don't know exactly. But yeah, nuclear fusion is way too advanced and far off to deal with AGW.

One thing, though, is that algae biofuels are looking really good. Like ethanol, but actually cost effective and doesn't destroy land. It's one thing to throw money at something, and an entirely different thing to intelligently invest money

And about people like Salk and Galileo, it's not a contradiction to suggest that finances affect science. Salk is an example of something that got done because everybody was scared shitless of polio, and there was a bit of monetary backing. In just a couple years of backing Salk's approach, we went from no vaccine to yes vaccine

Anyways, if you talk to scientists and engineers, they'll tell you that money talks, just like with all other professions. We went to the moon because of pumping money into it, we haven't gone to the Mars yet (or are not much closer) due to lack of funds. Also, increasing finances and popularity increases the talent pool. IMO, we have more 'geniuses' today than ever before because the pool from which these people are selected are much larger than back when Copernicus was around.