Just finished reading a fantastic Op-Ed in the Washington Post, entitled “A Dated Carbon Approach” by Sebastian Mallaby. The article discusses the problem that although many people accept global warming as a human problem, hardly anyone is willing to accept carbon regulation and taxation. Instead, they propose that we wait for technological innovation to save the day.

The Bush administration — and many Democrats, too — promise technological salvation: hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol distilled from grass, solar power, windmills, whatever. It’s more fun to call for whiz-bang technologies than regulations and taxes. But it’s also dishonest.

Mallaby calls this technological salvation approach dishonest because although we have come across technological innovation that could significantly mitigate the problem, we have yet to use it.

We already have technologies to cut carbon. Hybrid cars have been around for years, but almost nobody drives them. Small cars have been on the market even more years, but they aren’t consumer hits either. There are dozens of technologies to insulate buildings and design heating and cooling systems in efficient ways. The problem is we don’t use them.

On top of the fact that we haven’t taken advantage of the technical innovations we posses, Mallaby points out that the serious R&D that the government has been talking about is mostly lip service.

How do these fantasists suppose that we’ll get the next breakthrough? Government spending on basic research is supposed to do the trick: “The Administration has dedicated $1.2 billion over five years to the research and development needed to get hydrogen cars into the showroom,” declares a White House fact sheet. But that $240 million per year, or the $150 million a year that the administration wants to spend on advanced ethanol, is a laughably small sum. Private energy firms spend about $18 billion a year on researching new technology for extracting hydrocarbons.

Ok, I won’t spoil the rest of the article for you. Go read it!

Personally, I am all for technological innovations coming to help solve the global warming problem. Even so, we can’t just sit around and wait for technology to come to our rescue. We have no idea when technological innovation will occur, and we have no idea to what extent it will help us out. We have the technology to mitigate the problem now, without destroying our economy, which we can take advantage of until better technology emerges. And if we’re not going to use our technological innovations now, who says we’ll take advantage of them in the future?

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