Lomborg made a lot of a well known science trope: you can dash to the door with the current technology, or wait for the 2nd to market and use less of them, more cheaply, for greater effect. The problem is he didn't consider a couple of things. Firstly, it takes competitive tension to derive a second to market and the full tenor of his proposal removed it. Secondly, it assumed there was no accelleration in the problem. You can arrive late at the 2nd to market, in a worse world than the one you could have been fire-fighting in.
Leslie Groves said it best, about choices of how to proceed in the Manhatten project: "do both" -And in fact, this turned out to be key because using thermal diffusion as a feed stock enrichment to the calutrons turned out to be critical for time dependent delivery: Massive improvement in delivery because they didn't cheapen the investment.
I personally would have had no problem with CCS, BioChar and Solar/Wind being pursued aggressively at broadly equal levels of funding, and then looking back to decide which one had the best bang for buck. Instead, CCS was massively over funded against evidence of fugitive gas leak problems, Biochar was sold to the idea of "not having to do the others" and as a bribe to farmers, and both CCS and Biochar backers howled down funding for wind and solar claiming it was green nonsense.
Comments
Lomborg made a lot of a well known science trope: you can dash to the door with the current technology, or wait for the 2nd to market and use less of them, more cheaply, for greater effect. The problem is he didn't consider a couple of things. Firstly, it takes competitive tension to derive a second to market and the full tenor of his proposal removed it. Secondly, it assumed there was no accelleration in the problem. You can arrive late at the 2nd to market, in a worse world than the one you could have been fire-fighting in.
Leslie Groves said it best, about choices of how to proceed in the Manhatten project: "do both" -And in fact, this turned out to be key because using thermal diffusion as a feed stock enrichment to the calutrons turned out to be critical for time dependent delivery: Massive improvement in delivery because they didn't cheapen the investment.
I personally would have had no problem with CCS, BioChar and Solar/Wind being pursued aggressively at broadly equal levels of funding, and then looking back to decide which one had the best bang for buck. Instead, CCS was massively over funded against evidence of fugitive gas leak problems, Biochar was sold to the idea of "not having to do the others" and as a bribe to farmers, and both CCS and Biochar backers howled down funding for wind and solar claiming it was green nonsense.