I recently attended the Philomathia Foundation Symposium at Berkeley on "Pathways to a Sustainable Energy Future," which had a number of amazing speakers. I was particularly impressed with Arun Majumdar, the director of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, sponsored by the Dept. of Energy. ARPA-E's mission is explicitly bold: to fund potentially revolutionary technologies that are too risky for industry to fund. Another mission is to re-assert the United States' technological leadership.
I naively assumed that the U.S. is already at the top of their game technologically, but Majumdar pointed out that the majority of the leading "green" energy companies (solar companies, electric car manufacturers, advanced rechargeable battery manufacturers) are foreign. This may be because, as Manumdar says, "The U.S. spends more on potato chips than on Energy R&D." It seems we are addicted to what is bad for us (see previous post on oil addiction). I agree that we should rediscover some national pride in ingenuity and technology and re-assert our technological leadership. Promising research results can have a high impact commercially, ideally in the form of smart, socially and environmentally responsible capitalism (a source for another blog post: the academic-industry partnership).
Even though it is probably not enough, I am really excited by the government's commitment to fund these "big ideas." Although it's considered risky, I think we live too much in a society that is scared to take risks, scared to innovate, because of the chance of failure. Sure, most of these ventures won't pan out, but even if just a single innovative, pie-in-the-sky idea works, it could make today's technology obsolete.
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