One thought on “Monday Message Board”

1. Technical progress: a partial rescue

   I started writing another of my booster fixes of selective techno-optimism, the kind tat annoys my gloomy friend Ikonoclast, but the post rebelled and insisted on something else. Readers would have enjoyed to hear of work by serious Danes – famous writers don’t come glummer than Kierkegaard – on an antifouling coating for wind turbine blades incorporating fungi that eat the dead insects that stick to them as on your car windscreen and break up the laminar airflow. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CwbKnUi6x/ Instead here are some general musings on technical progress from the great height that only ignorance and chutzpah can allow.

   Point 1: current commercial technology is good enough to enable a nearly complete transition to a net zero economy. It will rely on (a) renewable electric generation (wind, water and solar), firmed by large batteries, pumped hydro, and stronger transmission grids, and (b) near-universal electrification of most energy uses. This will work out much cheaper than delaying the transition by burning fossil fuels as long as possible. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-09-14-decarbonising-energy-system-2050-could-save-trillions-oxford-study

   Point 2. There are six important industries where chemistry still calls for fossil fuels (petrochemicals, steel, cement, fertiliser), or physics calls for higher energy densities than current or firmly exp expected batteries can provide (aviation, oceanic shipping). There are promising solutions to all of these, needing further technical progress on electrification (eg batteries for ships and planes). In almost all cases, fossil hydrocarbons can readily be substituted by sustainable biofuels or synthetic e-fuels. This give a valuable flexibility, in case electrification runs into unexpected snags in one or two industries. Since net zero is not the end of the quest but a waypoint to a liveable climate, and large-scale carbon removal will be needed after it to restore a pre-industrial concentration of GHGs, there is no point in being fanatically purist over the last few percents to reach zero emissions. The Paris target is net zero for a reason.

   Point 3. The world has been extraordinarily lucky on technology. Until very recently. R&D on the electrotech stack has been a tiny fraction of that within the dominant fossil fuel stack, including dead ends like ICEV mileage standards. IIRC it has also been less than on has-been nuclear and jam-tomorrow fusion power. However, the trickle of public and private seed funding for today’s winners, and early-stage deployment subsidies in a handful of countries (Japan, Germany, Denmark, USA, China) was just enough to allow a critical early growth. For instance, the tiny but price-insensitive market created by early satellites generated critical early support for working photovoltaics.

   Point 4: With the boom in renewables, batteries and other electric technologies, the companies making them are rolling in cash and their spending on related R&D has skyrocketed. Take BYD, now the leading EV maker in the world and second in EV batteries behind specialist CATL: “The engineering team grew from over 20,000 in 2011 to nearly 110,000 by the end of 2024…. In recent years, over 70% of new recruits have been in R&D roles, with a high proportion of Master’s and Doctoral graduates.” “CATL employs roughly 18,000 to nearly 20,000 research and development (R&D) engineers focused on battery technology”. (Google AI)

   It is not a surprise that such companies regularly announce significant innovations, nor that progress continues in other areas of the electrostack like PV. “Global clean technology investment reached a record high of over $1.96 trillion in 2025, according to the Clean Investment Monitor.” (idem) The investors are typically young, fast-growing firms with a strong innovation culture. It is a safe bet that the private-sector R&D spend and workforce has been growing fast too. It would be remarkable if this did not lead to faster innovation across a broad spectrum of clean technology. At any rate, technical progress is sure to continue.

   Strictly speaking, little of this innovation is essential to the transition, which would still happen even if technology were completely frozen by a powerful spell purchased from evil Sarumans by Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal. In the normal course of events, electrostack products will keep getting cheaper, and so will electricity. A cheaper transition is a faster one, and every year that net zero is brought forward is vital relief and means many lives saved.

   There are qualifications. The spectrum of private innovation will be wide, but incomplete, and suffers from several biases. Path dependence we can in practice ignore. It might have been better to spend more on wave energy, concentrating solar and enhanced geothermal, but they can’t now catch up with the winners. The bias of the free market towards the problems of the rich leads to neglect of climate adaptation, calling for drought-resistant crops, sea defences and the like. Most important, reliance on capitalist initiative short-changes public goods, including biodiversity, tropical diseases and carbon removal.

   Point 5: what are the implications for government policy? Professional economics, as opposed to the writers of get-rich airport paperbacks, has notoriously little to say about the driving mechanism of growth and change, competitive innovation. Is here any coherent theory, let alone evidence, on the optimum scale and distribution of public research funds? It’s decision making under radical uncertainty. What rational basis did FDR have for launching the Manhattan Project with unlimited funding? It could easily have turned out as useless as the Emperor Rudolf II’s alchemy labs in Prague in sixteenth-century Prague – or as beneficial as the Longitude Prize of Hanoverian Britain.

   A very large collective investment in expensive particle physics has not yielded anything very useful directly – but it serendipitously gave us the World-Wide-Web and Sergey Brin (but not Tim Berners-Lee) his $290 billion fortune. Basic science funding is throwing darts blindfold at the great mandala or wheel of fortune of the unknown, in the mere knowledge that if you don’t buy a shot you will certainly not win a teddy bear or transistor. Existing funding is almost certainly suboptimal, but in which directions we cannot say.

   Things are a little clearer for public support of applied research and development. I have mentioned above the bias of private capitalism against innovation in public goods, so the known problems of inequality, the biosphere, tropical diseases and carbon removal all deserve priority. Governments also have legitimate strategic interests in policy autonomy and national resilience to supply shocks, though the long history of the nuclear energy boondoggle, and its glitzy young competitor hydrogen energy, are not grounds for optimism they will get this right.

   Overall, we have tu acknowledge the strange contradiction that our generation has comprehensively betrayed our grandchildren to an avoidable climate breakdown, and are going backwards on rational governance and democracy: but are leaving them an extraordinary array of useful science and technology they can use to clean up our mess.