Will the GOP Congress Spark a Green Tech Boom?

The federal government has an indispensable role in developing new green technologies. But can the GOP House be convinced?

When it comes to climate change science, too many conservatives who should know better behave like crows on a power line – when one takes off onto a wild tangent, others follow without a second thought.

George Will, for instance. Will's periodic excursions into James Inhofe's climate change candyland of wild hypotheses, trite sloganeering, and sloppy distortions has been disheartening, given that Will, unlike foghorns in Congress and on talk radio, is a worthy exemplar of William F. Buckley's tradition of conservative intellectual rigor.

Buckley once said, "Conservatism implies a certain submission to reality."

So, it was a pleasant surprise to find Will tutoring congressional newcomers to be careful about slashing recklessly at science research budgets when they take their knives to federal budget bloat.

Science is the ticket to beating the competition that we face from the hungry giants of the developing world. We may not be able to undersell them anymore, but we can still outsmart them – provided we cultivate science brains in our universities and feed them generous helpings of funding for carefully conceived research projects.

The federal government has an indispensable role in research. Discovering and developing advances in useful technologies is a long game requiring capital patient enough to answer questions involving basic science, pursue promising lines of inquiry, some of which, inevitably, will turn out to be cul-de-sacs, and arrive at solutions that work at the bench scale and might, just might work profitably in the marketplace.

The private sector can't afford to take all the risks that long-range science R&D entails. Nor do the societal benefits that might accrue from science and engineering breakthroughs – less air pollution from cleaner energy technology, for example – figure in the return-on-investment calculations of private investors.

Yes, yes, the tea partygoers huff impatiently, but is promoting science constitutional? The Founders thought scientific advances important enough to confer on Congress the explicit power to authorize patents and copyrights. Note the preface they wrote to this enumerated power: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts…"

As Will noted, pushing the envelope on science is a foundation for economic vitality – like the public works legislation that Congress adopted during the small government glory days of the 19th century, like Lincoln's Transcontinental Railroad, like Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, like the federally sponsored research programs that served up nuclear energy, gas turbines, and the internet that now hosts Tea Party web sites and blogs dedicated to returning the federal government to a libertarian Valhalla that has never existed.

Lately, the federal government hasn’t been pushing the science envelope as hard as it should. Energy is an egregious example of "eating up the seed corn," as Will phrased it. The federal government spends $30 billion per year on medical research and $80 billion annually on defense R&D. Energy – where public health, national security, economic vitality, and environmental stewardship intersect – is a tiddler, at $5 billion annually.

Meanwhile, energy innovation has been caught in crossfire between ideologues – the left pushing unwanted bureaucratic aggrandizement, the right mindlessly chanting "drill, baby, drill."

Last fall, three think tanks inhabiting distant niches on the political spectrum – the Brookings, American Enterprise, and Breakthrough institutes – jointly published a report that calls for tearing down the ideological barricades with a policy "reset:" - tripling federal energy research budgets and reforming allocation of the dollars, in order to build on federal R&D's track record of driving down the costs of innovative energy technologies and priming them for the marketplace.

Energy innovation historically has lit the fires of America’s economic vitality. It can again, as long as what Will called a "curdled populism" doesn't dry up America's brainpower and cede R&D to other countries, which would only be too happy to sell America the products of foreign innovation.

Will's cautionary advice for Congress to keep stoking America's innovation engine is welcome. His taking of a less blinkered, more nuanced approach to climate science would be equally welcome.