Hey, candidates: Why not an Energy X-Prize?

To conservatives, the number one threat to our grandchildren's generation is radical Islamic jihadism; to progressives, it's global warming.  I've seen each side ridicule the other's top priority as politicially-inspired fear-mongering.  Both sides consider the debate to be a contest: the Virtuous Truth-bearers versus the Scheming Liars.  Here are the definitions: 

Virtuous Truth-bearers:
Selfless good guys trying their best to defend our grandchildren's future well-being, but struggling to get the true message through to the masses.

Scheming Liars:
Power-hungry bad guys trying their best to get themselves elected by hypnotizing enough gullible voters into believing their false message, grandchildren's generation be damned. 

Which of those two groups do you belong to?

Just kidding, because I already know the answer.  If Americans were polled on that question, the Virtuous Truth-bearers would number in the hundreds of millions—outnumbering the Scheming Liars by hundreds of millions.  So, my guess is that you are a Virtuous Truth-bearer.  That's good, because an Energy X-Prize has something big in it for you, not to mention all of your fellow Truth-bearers. 

Newsweek skewers Newsweek
Newsweek's Robert J. Samuelson recently skewered his own magazine for last week's global warming cover story. His whole article is here, but he hit the nail on the head with this statement:

The global-warming debate's great un-mentionable is this: we lack the technology to get from here to there. 

He's right: technological innovation is what we need, not a debate victory for one side's political talking points.  If we could accomplish a few of the right technological breakthroughs, we'd take a giant leap towards both sides' stated goals.  The sooner we achieve those technological breakthroughs, the better for our grandkids' generation.  If we could do it within the next ten years, it could make our grandkids not only much, much safer, but also tens of trillions of dollars wealthier. 

The Energy X-Prize: something for everyone
This should be a unanimous no-brainer—or, at worst, a near-unanimous small-brainer.  I described it last year as a "21st century GI Bill"— but I now think "Energy X-Prize" is a better name for it.  It's carrot economics (a lucrative reward for doing something government defines as "good"), instead of stick economics (a stiff penalty for doing something government defines as "bad").  For example, one prize might be a $1 billion, federally-funded X-Prize offered to the first person or organization that demonstrated how to build a safe, lightweight, mobile, rechargeable battery or capacitor rated at 400 kilowatt hours, which is enough stored energy to run a personal automobile for several hundred miles on domestically-generated electric power, instead of using gasoline or diesel. 

A federally-funded X-Prize is merely an extension of Paul Romer's thesis that, yes, government does have a role to play in economic growth. 

Imagine just a few of the benefits to society if someone could win that particular X-prize:

• Instead of importing oil, we could build and export superbatteries or supercapacitors;

• Instead of funding terrorism with petrodollars, we'd help fund anti-terrorism defense (and offense) with electrodollars;

• Instead of American laws penalizing Americans for putting too much CO2 into American skies, we'd be helping the entire car-driving world to stop emitting CO2 into the entire world's skies. 

See, there's something there for everyone.  I'd like to see one of the presidential candidates latch onto this idea.  Spending a billion (or ten billion) extra dollars today is mere chickenfeed when the future return is security, a cooler globe, and trillions of extra dollars for our grandkids.  After all, that's the generation all the Virtuous Truth-bearers are saying they're focused on, isn't it? 

Comments

[Grodge]

Awards for NEW energy technology! Eegads, you sound like a stinkin' Dumbocrat:

http://tinyurl.com/2hpavh

http://tinyurl.com/2c7vvj

Everyone knows this is how you fight terrorists:

http://tinyurl.com/jazvz

[rufus]

No Need; The Market's already doing it.

Interesting story up in Reynolds, In, by the way.

[Kevin]

Have to say I pretty much agree with Rufus -- if you can accomplish this feat, you'll make a few billion anyway in the free market. And everyone who matters already knows this.

Hence tons of private and large corporate capital and every qualified electrical engineer is already at work on the problem -- so what's the point of the government largesse?

On the other hand, I certainly prefer talk of an X-Prize over the tired Manhattan Project / Apollo Program analogies, as if tons of government fraud and waste will magically make batteries last longer.

[Steve]

I'm for the free market too, but government is interfering with it today. Tariffs here, subsidies there, all for politically-favored interest groups. I'd rather have the government stop picking winners and start rewarding outside-the-box innovators, instead of impeding them.

[Counter Revolutionary]

Steve, et. al., this is slightly off topic, but have you folks tracked any of the discussions of the NASA resetting hottest years back to the 30s? A couple of recent years are still hot, but rankings have shifted to an era before the big CO2 increase.

NASA made the change last week 8/10 without any notice and absolutely no fan fair.

[Steve]

I have no details, but heard on the radio that the calculations were in error, caught by a third party, then corrected by NASA.

I wonder what this does to the models.

[John S.]

Steve, unfortunately energy conservation does not alway work the way we expect it to. LCD computer screens are a good example. They use about a third of the energy of the old CRTs. Our computers should be using a lot less energy, right?

Not so. In my office, the minimum is two huge CRTs and many people -- secretaries even -- have three.

[Bob]

John: You're generalizing. Not a good thing to do.

I'm with Steve on government incentive. Incentive not management. But, to be fair, if ethanol producers can be subsidized why not battery inventors? Doh! Maybe, it has something to do with straw polls and primaries.

Free markets. Hah! How many of you
have choices in your electricity and natural gas suppliers?

[Ariah]

The part I love about this post is that he points out that both sides of the political spectrum make the same arguments, just about different issues. I'm continually astonished by the degree to which people demonize fellow Americans because they hold different political perspectives, which in turn results in a different set of primary concerns.

As for the proposed Energy X-Prize, no doubt the market will create this on its own, but I have no problem with spending a billion bucks to make it available sooner. Considered as a portion of the national budget, a billion dollars is nothing, whereas this technology would be extremely useful for our nation.

Also, the Al Gore prizes above struck me as rather laughable. The grand prize is 30,000 pounds, which is less than a lot of middle class people make in a year. Definitely not the sort of things most companies will be clamoring to achieve, unless it's for the PR value. And this is the "world leading" renewable energy prize? I sure hope not.

[Big Daddy Matty]

Ariah:

I think you have the cause and effect backwards. It is people's different sets of primary concerns (I prefer the term "values") that leads them to different political perspectives, that term meaning the ways in which people believe society ought to go about trying to achieve outcomes consistent with those sets of concerns.

While I agree that demonization is neither constructive nor necessary, it is absolutely vital that each side make its best case for both its values and its preferred means of promoting them. In turn, it is just as vital that political actors point out instances that either demonstrate that their opponents' values ought (either temporarily or permanently) to be reasonably considered inferior to their own, or that the means by which those on the other side seek to achieve their goals are inefficient, destructive, or self-contradictory, _regardless_ of the nobility of the value being served.

When folks on the right point, for example, to the lack of scientific certainty behind man-made global warming alarmism, and the economically crippling effects most anti-warming proposals would have on the world at large, particularly developing nations and the poor, they aren't just demonizing or being stubborn. They're pointing out that a) there is scant evidence the primary value concerned is not being served in the status quo; b) attempting to better serve that value in the manner proposed would have the ancillary effect of doing profound harm to another concern that is at least as important; c) the proposal(s) would also require the subjugation of another of the left's own primary values, likely its most ennobling; and, d) persons who are so single-minded toward a cause as to vigilantly campaign for "solutions" so obviously and deeply flawed are either unreasonably fanatical or disturbingly ignorant, and therefore call into question their entire value systems, judgment, and trustworthiness on other issues of great import. Saying that someone has bad priorities, is unhealthily attached to them, and therefore makes bad judgments, is not the same as saying that that person is evil.