Why Innovation Prizes Fail
<i>Last year Elon Musk announced $100 million to come up with ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure why the author is convinced this approach won&#x27;t work, but there is certainly a better option for any country that wants to address the situation, and it&#x27;s been done in many other areas.  Establish federal funding agencies devoted to the goal, and use those funds to establish dedicated research departments at leading universities, which employ professors and technicians who bring in grad students and postdocs to work in their labs.  The result has been very successful in areas like cancer research - childhood leukemia has gone from a almost uniformly fatal disease to one with a 90% survival rate.  Why?  How many universities have some kind of NIH-funded &#x27;Center for Cancer Research&#x27;?<p>However, you won&#x27;t find any such comparably funded centers for renewable energy research at leading universities, because the US government won&#x27;t fund them through the obvious agency, the DOE.  DOE budgets make for interesting reading, because it becomes clear that the history of the DOE - from Manhattan Project to Atomic Energy Commission to &#x27;DOE&#x27; - rather reveals it was set up mainly to deal with the nuclear weapons program, and the vast amount of highly toxic waste it generated.  The DOE foray into &#x27;clean coal&#x27; initiated around 2000 has been one of the most fraudulent &#x27;scientific&#x27; programs ever run in the USA, from bogus nonsense like &#x27;FutureGen&#x27; on down.  They were characterized by &#x27;public-private partnerships&#x27; which allowed DOE partners (coal and oil corporations) to hide the data about their gross failures behind proprietary claims.  Literally billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into these rat holes with nothing to show for it for over 20 years.  Case in point:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FutureGen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FutureGen</a><p>This leaves countries who have invested heavily in basic R&amp;D in the solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;storage sector well ahead of the USA.  China is certainly the leader in solar, having mastered large-scale production of monocrystalline silicon wafers for high-efficiency, durable PV.  Germany and Japan are in a similar position.  Australia, even with its heavy reliance on coal, has long funded innovative solar research.  The US government instead has devoted itself to funding fraudulent fossil fuel games (whatever CO2 gets captured at DOE-financed plants has almost universally been used for enhanced oilfield recovery, and much of it just gets boiled back off to the atmosphere during crude oil processing).<p>I don&#x27;t know why the author didn&#x27;t mention any of this, but if you&#x27;re going to base an article on a line about Musk&#x27;s $100 million effort, you might want to dig into that history, right?  As far as Musk&#x27;s approach, here&#x27;s the latest update on how that&#x27;s going:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;technology&#x2F;elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal-prize-announces-15-milestone-winners&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;technology&#x2F;elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal...</a><p>However, if the USA really wanted to get on top of this and move towards a rapid transition to renewable energy (read: 3% reduction in fossil fuel production and consumption per year, with an equivalent growth in renewable energy to meet demand), it would probably need a new funding agency outside the DOE&#x2F;NNSA, with a budget comparable to that of NIH, i.e. $30 billion a year.  Given that the USA is almost as much of a petro-state, economically speaking, as Russia and Venezuela are, I don&#x27;t really expect much progress on this from our fearful political &#x27;leaders&#x27; (who are, in reality, more like corporate middle managers).