The green exploitation industry is spinning in confusion lately as it becomes ever more necessary to retreat from some of their silliest advocacy positions - such as ethanol.

“Dangerous Assumptions,” as it is titled, has been covered extensively by the mainstream media as a warning about ‘underplaying’ climate change. The environmental press, however, has attacked it for blandly pushing technology investment without taking into account the current technologies that could be deployed to fight climate change. Joseph Romm, over at Grist, for example, calls for more deployments of existing technologies over more R&D.

What he, and a lot in the environmental movement miss, is that clean technologies, especially new energy tech, require a lot of development long after they are conceived or patented. Take the majority of industries that E2T follows–cellulosic ethanol, algae biodiesel, thin film solar PV–and it becomes clear that much of this technology still exists in journals and papers, not in the marketplace yet.

Saying that the next generation of solar concentrating power plants are available now is like saying that cellphone technology existed in 1983. Sure it did, but not in the right form to drive adoption.

The real question is: how should government funds be generated and directed to help get these technologies in their early stages to market? While a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with the government picking winners, how else can big money be directed to the right places?

How can government know the right places? If government can know why wouldn't smart money know better and sooner? Government is, after all, the last to know as information and ideas trickle up from the true knowledge and judgement sources. And, it is the last to act since policy development is a slow process. Worst of all, by the time policies have been mauled by political interests they are crippled, misdirected, excessively expensive and ultimately ineffective. There are issues for which this is the best that can be done, but technology development and deployment isn't one of them.

It isn't only that knowledge arises in society and only slowly becomes available to government. It is also that society has excellent dispute resolution mechanisms. Competing ideas can all be tried in parallel to find out which are better. Often there is no clear winner, and so competing approaches coexist.

The more you are concerned about these issues the less you should support government intervention. It is the slowest and least effective approach. The proper role for government is to seek ways to remove impediments erected in the past in mistaken efforts to control society. This is asking for something unnatural but we have extenuating circumstances that require government to rise above itself and act for the good of society. We need good governance at this time rather than politics as usual. The pork fest can resume once we improve our prospects.