New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, in his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, tries desperately to convince us that Kyoto, Kyoto II and mandatory carbon emission reductions are the only solutions to addressing global climate change.
But the simple truth is that innovation is the cheapest and most effective way of addressing both climate change and the need for clean, cheap energy.
As Bjorn Lomborg, author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, pointed out in his review of Friedman’s book in The Wall Street Journal, “ . . . research and development is both much less costly and a much better investment . . .” than the proposed draconian methods currently considered.
Lomborg points to computers as a perfect example of how R&D made very expensive machines affordable enough “ . . . that it provided more good than it cost.” The government did not mandate use of those clunky, massive and expensive 1950s and 60s computers. Rather, government and industry invested in the technological advances that made computers more efficient and affordable.
In 1969 the first computer-to-computer transmission was made successfully by the military in cooperation with UCLA and Stanford, birthing ARPANET, later to grow up to be the Internet. Twenty years later Sir Tim Berners-Lee successfully put the World Wide Web within reach of everyone after significant investment in technology through the cooperative efforts of business and government.
In short, the private sector—sometimes with a little input from the government—has a track record of identifying and producing unimaginable innovations that solve our problems.
So before we hock our futures in carbon emission standards and requirements made by international treaty, let’s direct our leaders to promoting and incentivizing innovation.
Where to start? Make the research and development tax credit permanent. And reform the tax code so that it reflects the reality of our 21st Century information economy.
Friedman is at least correct when he says, “If you take only one thing away from this book, please take this: we are not going to regulate our way out of the problems . . . we can only innovate our way out.” If only the rest of his book were so prescient!