It's good to see more money flowing towards this totally underfunded area. However I think it's an odd choice of them to focus on filtration, UV-inactivation and other things and at least from the wording on the website not on ventilation, which they sort of assume as given. They also seem to be way very focused on product development rather than awareness, public policy and lobbying. This is a typical techno-fix approach for an area where existing technologies already exist and are just held back by all types of different market failures (hard to estabilish causality, low salience, needs to be done at large scale, concentrated costs but dispersed benefits, lack of information etc.). In some way it's like funding Direct Air Capture instead of Solar & Wind but in a fictional world where Solar and Wind are already as cheap as today but have a buildout like 20 years ago.
Comments
It's good to see more money flowing towards this totally underfunded area. However I think it's an odd choice of them to focus on filtration, UV-inactivation and other things and at least from the wording on the website not on ventilation, which they sort of assume as given. They also seem to be way very focused on product development rather than awareness, public policy and lobbying. This is a typical techno-fix approach for an area where existing technologies already exist and are just held back by all types of different market failures (hard to estabilish causality, low salience, needs to be done at large scale, concentrated costs but dispersed benefits, lack of information etc.). In some way it's like funding Direct Air Capture instead of Solar & Wind but in a fictional world where Solar and Wind are already as cheap as today but have a buildout like 20 years ago.