We progress by accident rather than intention. It's not that we don't have intentions, they just turn out to be naive and/or mistaken. However, we tend to airbrush that out of history.

Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design.

If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things "by accident," outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research. What academia seems more masterful at is public relations and fundraising.

This is good news--for some. Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor and consider the following puzzle. Whenever you hear a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as "unintellectual," "uneducated," and "poor in math," because, unlike European schooling, American education is not based on equation drills and memorization.

Yet the person making these statements will likely be addicted to his iPod, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his "cultural" statements on his Intel-based PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. If old enough, he might also be using Viagra.

America's primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way.

This infuriates Europeans, europhiles in academia, and what Jane Jacobs called the guardian class - those who seek to direct society rather than produce for society. However, if we honestly evaluate intellectual and scientific history we find that this is necessarily so.

I suspect that we have an example of this emerging in the climate change machinations of the chattering and political classes. [via The Volokh Conspiracy]

Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we're talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations.

What's more, preliminary data indicate that America's CO2 output fell by 1.3% from 2005 to 2006. If these numbers hold up, it would mean U.S. emissions growth is nearly flat so far this decade. Europe hasn't yet released figures for last year, but it did report in June that emissions from the participants in its carbon-trading scheme, which account for almost half of Europe's CO2 production, rose slightly in 2006.

The news gets worse for Europe when you consider that during this decade, the U.S. population has grown at roughly double the rate of the EU-15 while the American economy has been expanding about 40% faster.

Other politicians, Jonathan Adler from Volokh in the case, see this as support for their schemes.

Like me, Julian Morris thinks that some form of carbon tax, combined with investment in adaptation, makes more sense than a global cap-and-trade scheme.

A more cost-efficient and effective alternative to stem global warming would be to invest in new technologies that could cut greenhouse gas emissions in the future. One way to incentivize such investments is to impose a small but rising tax on carbon. Environmental economist Ross McKitrick has suggested a carbon tax that would be tied to the mean temperature of the tropical troposphere (a region of the atmosphere that is believed to be particularly susceptible to greenhouse gas-induced warming). If the temperature rises, the tax should rise; if it falls the tax should fall. This is an intuitively appealing idea, since a higher tax would probably spur more rapid developments of low-carbon technologies, countering further carbon-related increases in temperature.

It seems far more likely to me that solutions will come out of the blue than that they will be in any way related to any of the various political schemes. The best that can be said is that with all of the money sloshing around the solution might be an accidental byproduct of some political scheme. It doesn't matter which one. All of the noogie wars only determine which special interests will get the most loot while doing nothing useful about climate change. It's a variant of the million monkeys trope. But, solutions are as likely to come from elsewhere.

It seems that a better way to influence outcomes is to do a better job of collecting and disseminating information. We may not be able to determine who will use that information or how they will use it, but they may not do their inventive work, or recognize their inadvertent creations, if they are not aware of the situation. We can help by making our best information about the issues widely available. We can also help by supporting research and invention. This isn't just a matter of funding. Support can also be given by recognizing and celebrating discovery and invention. School kids would be far better off hearing the praises of such creators sung in their classes than by hearing about the venal machinations of politicians. More science, less politics. Politics is the mind killer - it has been said.