3 ms·
See this is the thing. People thing 10 billion dollars is a lot of money. My view is that 10 billion dollars is nothing. My view is that the total OECD inves
by urthor 5y ago
See this is the thing.
People thing 10 billion dollars is a lot of money.
My view is that 10 billion dollars is nothing.
My view is that the total OECD investment in fusion R&D should be 10 billion. A year. For the next 50 years.
The investment in the high ROI technologies, principally solar R&D and overnight energy capacity projects like water pump batteries, should be 100 billion (across the OECD). And the investment in CapEx, installing new panels, 200 billion.
Our investment in STEM R&D, as a society, is just pitiful across the Western world.
The portion of our tax dollars that go to long term R&D, the primary driver of productivity growth and progress in our nation's, is scrap.
- stormbrew 5y agoI don't really disagree with any of this, so I guess that's confirmation that you did see my point. Certainly, the fact that solar and wind are sure things right now warrants massive investment. Just throwing endless gobs of money at a problem that's as-yet unsolved doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes, it also takes directed goals and all that. That's in theory what ITER is all about, though I think the slowness with which it got started will hamper it and we'll see success on other projects before it even gets to the testing phase. It was an attempt to create a moonshot that kinda failed, but the private sector seems more interested now so it might not matter. That said I'd actually be surprised if there isn't already much more than $200bil going into building out solar capacity worldwide. It's just not easily enumerated because it's not special anymore, and a lot of it is on small scales (ie. I'm gonna install about $20k of solar panels to my home this spring and I'm not alone, but it's hard to tell how much that adds up to).