I’m a big fan of Star Trek. I like the notion of a high-tech, idealistic future with attractive architecture and clean streets. So I do wonder, occasionally, what it will take to get there and whether specific policies enacted now can make that future happen. Or, if not THAT exact future, something like it.
Politically it seems like most of the folks interested in making the environment clean are on one side of the political spectrum–but their primary political methods for ensuring that we get that clean environment are coercive: more government rules, regulations, and taxes. Such policies interfere with economic growth and even freedom in some cases, causing many folks to resent the policies even if they result in a better environment for everyone.
On the other side of things, we have capitalism, which depends on continual growth, which means continual expansion of products and services, which in turn means we must extract more resources and very often create more pollution. Many people believe that growth can continue unchecked without any consequences.
This endless hostility between environmentalism and economic growth doesn’t need to be permanent. There have to be policies that can be pro-economic growth that also support the environment. I’d like to see cleaner streets, self-driving electric cars, clean air and water, trash heaps used for resources or fuel, and more greenery in cities and towns.
- Why not talk tax breaks (not subsidies, which are direct payments of taxpayer monies) for such technologies?
- Why not streamlined regulations to bring newer, safer nuclear power plants online?
- Why not treat space as an economically undeveloped area (“enterprise zone“), where space-based solar power and asteroid mining can be developed tax-free for 20 years until the space above our heads has an economy strong enough to produce growth?
- Why not zoning laws that set aside space for and encourage greener technologies?
- Why not capitalist-based incentives to develop carbon sequestration or other technologies?
Science fiction author David Brin calls these technological efforts TWSBDA (Things We Should Be Doing Anyway). If you find a way to provide incentives for building world-improving technologies that lead to profit (without direct government spending), you might eliminate some of the political friction in the climate change debate. We can do all these things–create a better, growing economy with more clean energy and more technology–without coercion and without sticking it to “the system.”
Or perhaps I’m just being too optimistic again. Jeez, I hope not. I really want to see someone build a starship.
The Real Bart Leahy 