Never Mind How -- Just Build It!

What an absolutely marvelous, perfectly rational suggestion. What an absolutely sensible way to solve the energy crisis that underlies whatever else is bedeviling this country. It’s at the core of an approach to energy solutions printed by Newsweek Magazine this week.
They’re quoting, of all people, a Congressman. Rep. Bart Gordon, Chairman of the House Science & Technology committee, calls this crisis another “sputnik moment”. He recommends another major government led effort like the ones that created atomic energy, sent us to the moon, developed the Internet and launched the computer revolution.
Only government, he points out accurately, can create and lead such a program. I’ll add that you would never have had a big enough steel industry, a coast to coast railroad or an automobile revolution if government hadn’t led and paved the way – with tax breaks, land giveaways and outright subsidies.
We have the finest brain pools in the world – to name Stanford, MIT, University of Michigan and Harvard as just a few. There’s still some competent R&D going on in the private sector. Only government can pull the best of the best together and get them working on a single project – as it did with the Manhattan Project during World War II.
That, says Congressman Gordon is exactly what we need to provide a real solution to the energy problems we face. He’s right. Only government can afford to take the risk of telling a group of brain heavy scientists: This is what we need you to do; you figure out how.
The private sector has to know pretty much where it is going and how before it can put vast amounts of money into a program. Only government can say, “We’re going to the moon in ten years. We have no idea how or with what, but you’re going to figure that out and get us there.”
That wouldn’t fly in a board room. Their constraints would lead to the “incremental change” that Mr. Gordon says we don’t need more of. What we need is “revolutionary breakthrough” -- the kind that only becomes apparent once you’ve got enough Ph.D.s and equipment in one place, and they have the freedom to play around, to experiment at will.
Go build something that will fit inside a plane and obliterate a city when dropped. We’ve never even figured out how to set off a chain reaction, but you just work on it and build. And, should it result in nuclear powered electrical plants and submarines that can say submerged almost forever, that’s a nice by-product. Boy, do government programs produce profitable by-products!
The Manhattan project hasn’t stopped delivering yet. The sputnik-inspired moon flight gave us the entire computer revolution, from Apple to Microsoft, desktops and laptops – all because a large number of very bright people were handed a few billion and told to figure out how to do something.
Only government could have pulled them all together – taken the risk, funded the risk and let what happens happen. I remember when I was in Washington over 40 years ago there was a lot of talk about government research into ways of disseminating data electronically between universities. They did it – and we have the Internet as a result.
Enough American innovation and enough resources and they’ll come up with an energy solution. (How about cars that run on water? Hydrogen and oxygen are both combustible, and neither should create polluting exhaust.) This is the kind of end result we need – you guys figure out how to make it.
During World War II, It was noted that the American GI was particularly effective in a situation where he had no officers around and no written plan. He just innovated. Other armies floundered without orders from the top; GIs used their native ingenuity and did what was necessary.
We still have that skill. Even our Ph.D.s and professors have it (think how many businesses have been started by academics near major American universities!) Let’s do like the Congressman suggests and pull together another Manhattan Project or NASA.
Won’t it be nice when the Arabs and the Chinese want to buy energy from us?