[nnq]

As a non-american I still think that climate change is the wrong problem for the US to focus on, and space exploration and colonization goals are better targets.

The US has a huge concentration of wealth and brainpower. Neither of those are what's need to solve climate change. You'd need an army of Mahatma Gandhis and the new breed of "social entrepreneurs", not of Einsteins and Oppenheimers.

And you know, that concentration of wealth and brainpower is actually one of the problems that would have to be solved to solve climate change: India and China and soon Africa and all the other poorer countries will keep not giving a fuck about climate change and polution if it helps them pull up their living standards. Those CO2 and methane taxes: they'd rather fight a nuclear/chem/bio war than pay them! Only thing that would incite a more global cooperation towards reducing climate change would be a massive global redistribution of wealth.

And that would mean the end of US as an economic superpower among many other things.

So imho, US should shoot for the stars while you still can and raise the standard of the international space race at all cost! ...cause after the next either world war or "global redistribution of wealth" there might not be enough concentration of brainpower and wealth left to do these things, and the human race needs some kind of plan B!

[Tuna-Fish]

I couldn't disagree with you more.

New Einsteins and Oppenheimers are precisely what's needed to fight climate change. "Social enterpreneurs" will do jack squat, other than make people feel better. The only way to actually beat climate change is to improve the relevant technology to the point where the route to high standard of living is cheaper to do with clean tech. Constantly reducing the cost of solar power, and better batteries mean that we are halfway there.

The job of carbon taxes is not to be the cause of reducing global emissions in the long term. It's to make development of cleaner energy production more economically viable in the short term, to drive investment that way, so that the cost can eventually be driven below fossil fuels.

It's not necessary for some to be pulled down for others to climb up. The rest of the world catching up (and they will) will do nothing to the capability of the the USA.

[phil21]

> I couldn't disagree with you more.

While I try to avoid politics on HN - I'm one data point in disagreement with you.

The only thing to realistically fight climate change is de-population. At least if you want everyone to have a similar standard of living as the "West".

Cleaner energy is something we need - but simple math can tell you that at our current population growth and developmental growth of incredibly poor but populous nations - it only extends the inevitable.

Any environmental program that doesn't make population growth it's first concern is simply a feel-better program in my opinion. It's ignoring the mountain to focus on the molehills.

Anything a future environmental Einstein comes up with will be instantly used to slam the world population right up the the new limit (e.g. the invention of nitrogen fixation).

[nnq]

> "Social enterpreneurs" will do jack squat

You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...

Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.

We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!

But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.

Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.

But... it just feels totally backwards to me!

Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.

Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.