Gold wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:29 pm
JR. wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:13 pm
What makes you think DARPA is not working on this (at least alternate fuels like biofuels)..?
I keep waiting for solar cells and batteries to get better/more efficient..(game changing improvements have been right around the corner for decades
). They get incrementally better but volumes are driven by government incentives and central planning... China is heavily invested in dominating the solar market and eventually the EV.
I think DARPA is working on these things. It's not the tip of the spear for a concerted effort the USA to be technological leader like in computer science.
Space force seems more pressing, while cyber security remains high on the list. China has already demonstrated capability to shoot down satellites out of orbit.
Drama surrounding chinese company Huawei seems appropriate. Cheap 5G gear may be a trojan horse to gain visibility into all that data flowing in future western 5G networks.
I think it's a crisis that China and Germany are leaving us in the dust.
? Germany is not as strong as they were before they decommissioned their nuclear power plants, and Angela Merkel invited 1M migrants into the country. Instead of cheap labor to help keep the factories humming she got civil problems from the culture clash, and new low popularity with her voters. That open door slammed shut pretty fast. The EU is getting moved around by negative interest rates from EU central bankers, and BREXIT uncertainty.
China's success at central planning still stands to be seen. Their accounting is pretty opaque so hard to trust. They like to subsidize key technologies to drive competitors out of the world market (like solar panel makers). A few years back they did that for rare earth metals market, now they threaten withholding RE as pressure point for trade negotiations.
Japan figured out how to make EV technologies less dependent on rare earths, and we can reopen our closed processing plants again if it becomes economic again. (Rare earth processing is dirty and generally undesirable).
A large portion of home energy needs could be met with current solar technology in the US. Maybe not everywhere but in a lot of places. There could be a mandate that some percentage of home energy must come from solar. Then investment in solar would drive the building industry.
The government thumb is already on that scale but it still does not change the underlying economics. As I speculated recently the useful life of solar panels is 25 years and we've been putting them up a lot longer than that (albeit in modest numbers), with no effective recycling plan in sight. This will become more pressing in time.
The green new deal is a feel good concept (wish list), not a viable plan.
JR
Cancel the "cancel culture", do not support mob hatred.