One of the least savory parts of the climate change business is that it is a business, and so information is concealed, distorted, metaphored and hustled as opportunists try to cash in. Earlier posts pointed out how this has affected the scientific community, turning scientists into advocates for pet projects rather than honest brokers able to advise society, but the same is obviously true of private sector efforts.

This isn't a problem to be solved - it isn't solvable since the dynamics are identical whatever the sources of funding and however status is measured - but it means that boosterism is always suspect and usually unhelpful. Activists, as ever, are part of the problem rather than the solution. For example:

Joel Makower is a widely respected writer and consultant on issues of sustainable business, clean technology and green markets. His essays on environmental business and technology are a regular feature of Sustainability Sundays. Take it away, Joel:

For the better part of the past year, my colleagues and I at Clean Edge have been exploring the following question: What would an American “man on the moon” effort look like that could rapidly and dramatically transform solar energy into a truly cost-competitive, job-creating source of electricity? The project is the third in a series of research reports we’ve produced since 2002 for Co-op America’s Solar Catalyst Group.The fruits of that labor, called the Solar High-Impact National Energy (SHINE) Project, is a revenue-neutral, public-private partnership.

The italicized bit is from Makower's web site, advertising hustle to enhance the grift. It appeals to authoritarians who believe assertions variably depending on who made them rather than how sensible they are, and are too lazy to think at any rate.

Does a "moon shot" focus on any single energy technology make sense? No. That's the crap shoot approach most famously revealed as nonsensical with the Japanese fifth generation computing project. It isn't possible to pick winners from among all the promising technologies since we can't know what the future holds. Worse, focusing intently on a technology, funding it at a higher rate and watching closely for signs of progress, inhibits progress by introducing pressures and extraneous factors into the discovery mechanism. In short, it is mistaking techniques that are applicable and useful for engineering projects using known technologies for science. Science is not engineering.

But it may achieve useful goals for all its faults. We did land a man on the moon, though it was a dead end scientifically that many feel has been a stone around the neck of the space program ever since. It was the wrong way to advance space exploration, done for purely political reasons, wasted huge sums of money and great amounts of time while wrecking the research community.

The "moon shot" or "great leap forward" way of thinking is deeply flawed, something that only grasping opportunists and authoritarians can love. Still, many long to do something, to help somehow, to accelerate progress and hasten the arrival of tomorrow. Where's the fast forward button?

There isn't one, or there are many, or it's one of those interlocked systems where several buttons need to be pressed, some in sequence and others simultaneously, and the answers are all encrypted. It's an intelligence test of sorts though there is no designer watching and judging our performance. Our descendants will do that task.

So, what is the intelligent approach to solving this puzzle? Brute force seldom works, usually resulting in setback rather than progress. Finesse usually works better, and may require lateral moves or even backtracking. There is a combinatorial explosion of paths and no useful way to select among them. As with most modern problems the answer is to try them all, all at once, and see which ones yield benefits. Realistically, "all" does not mean an infinite number of efforts, it means many parallel efforts, but hopefully you get the point.

How is this done? It isn't a matter of squirting resources at every seemingly plausible energy project since that just sets off a feeding frenzy and draws parasitical posers. Again finesse is needed. The greatest benefit of the original "moon shot" wasn't a direct result of the program. It was an increase in the number of children who took an interest in science, mathematics and engineering. There was also an increase in public support for education in these fields and an increase in status for practitioners. Geeks became a little more cool, pocket protectors and slide rules became esoteric status symbols rather than badges of shame. OK, not completely, but more so.

Our problem is that we took our eyes off the ball, distracted by cultural and political concerns, and indulged Luddite anti-technology backlash. Meanwhile, lack of progress in the techniques of techno-social civilization resulted in a backlog of tasks moldering in untidy piles all over the planet. Reactionaries want to "turn back the clock", whatever that means, but in practice they just want to sit down and wait to die.

It's a difficult problem. Hustlers like Makower are not part of the solution, they are just grifters making a living off troubled times. They aren't a problem that needs solving, that's how people are, but they are a side show, like the carrion birds that patrol the edges of a forest fire cleaning up. The motivation for that old moon shot wasn't the thrill of space flight, it was competition from the Red Menace. Western countries may not feel the competition now, but developing countries do. They are behind the curve and eager to catch up. Their momentum is great and they seem poised to take the lead in the not too distant future. That may wake the west up a bit.

In a perhaps implausible reverse psychology way it may be in our best interests to try to hasten that day. If we have resources to spend we may be better off helping them than squandering it on predators like Makower. It won't hurt to seek to improve our education system at the same time, though entrenched interests will fight that every step of the way. Our primary, secondary and advanced education systems are moribund, clogged with bureaucrats more interested in their own perquisites than educating youths.

Fortunately we are rich, or at least some are. Old money has become increasingly irrelevant, indeed was the cause of many current problems, but there's a lot of new money, new zillioaires, and having entered their maturity are beginning to use that money to influence society. They didn't make their money selling soap, they made it in tech industries, and their inclination and expertise seems to have a technological focus, at least in part. I suspect that more will come of their efforts than the more traditional political lobbying approach favored by activists and predators.

I also suspect that we will be surprised. Progress will result from an unexpected combination of disciplinary approaches. For example:

... consider the greatest advance in molecular biology to date: the sequencing of complete genomes. How was this tremendous accomplishment brought about? The cunning application of robotics.

A maverick with private money beat the snot out of the experts with comfortable sinecures, intending to make a career out of a multi-decade effort doing very little, by creatively approaching the problem. That method, a "synthesis of modern science and engineering", will be used again to good effect but we should anticipate other novel approaches too. It may be advances in computing - including software, or materials science - perhaps nanotech, or biology - perhaps genetic engineering and synthetic biology, or any combination of them all that yields the unexpected advances.

The narrowing of focus advocated by activists and predators is the wrong approach. We need to do everything at once, and look for synthetic opportunities. If there is any single thing that we might do to fertilize the creative soil it may well be to improve communication among specialties by making as much information as possible as widely available as possible. For example, rather than trying to pick some technology to boost by increasing funding and attention, pay journals to open their libraries to all. Pay science writers to consciously seek unusual multi-disciplinary subjects, with references, that may fire the imagination of some kid. Pay bloggers to be more diligent and productive in the sharing of their insights. These kinds of things can be done with chump change but the value produced is multiplied by the number of consumers.

Update:

In Are The Benefits Of Global Warning Underestimated? Randall Parker makes a related argument.

What we need are technologies that provide cheaper and less polluting energy. If we had those technologies we would not need to spend so much time arguing about green house gasses and climate projections. Rather than saddle the industrialized economies with very high taxes on fossil fuels to reduce energy use with a resulting slowing of economic growth why not launch a Manhattan Project to develop new energy sources?

This sounds like a call for a "moon shot", the very thing I was ridiculing, but he relies on Nobelist Richard Smalley's ideas about what this means.

I believe the U.S. should launch a 1B$/yr program within the Office of Science to find this answer, and plan to ramp this up to over $10B in 5 years. The new energy program must be big enough to inspire and capture the imagination of our nation's youth, get them to choose a career in science because of their idealism, and their sense of mission. And the program must be bold enough to actually make the necessary scientific breakthroughs happen.

That's quite different from a moon shot or Manhattan project in that the explicit expectation is that new discoveries are required and that they will come from a new generation of thinkers. Education and imagination are key.

"It would be very nice to have an alternative to fossil fuels—an alternative to nuclear fission—that would be capable of providing energy for what will probably be 10-15 billion people in the middle of this next century. I believe that if this alternative exists, it has to be solar. Right now we do not even have a solar technology that is even laughably close to being able to handle—for example—80% of all the world's energy production. If you don't do 80%, you're not touching the problem. And if you don't provide energy technology that is economically cheaper than the alternatives, it won't be adopted at all.

"Where is that solar technology going to come from? [It will come] not just from improving solar cells, but from something totally new. On a cloudy day in New York, can take most of the photons that hit on cheap collectors and store it in some useful form of energy—like hydrogen or electric charge. When you think about the physics that controls that, you're rapidly led to the conclusion that the physics which makes this possible happen within a little, 1 nm cubic box....

"I don't know what that solar technology is going to be, but I'll bet you that it's nanotechnology."

Smalley also seems to agree that these breakthroughs will be synthetic, will come from cross disciplinary applications.