Maybe it's only an example of how things work now but the Feds are giving the University of Alaska-Fairbanks $9 million to fund the research into the development of a coal-fired power house with an integrated CCS system and pipeline project to move the liquid CO2.
Analyzing this sort of transaction reveals an interesting sequence of events in US technological progress.
First of all, in defiance of the tenets of capitalism the federal government determines what research, from the many possible, are within its domain. Theoretically, if society was genuinely interested in "clean" energy production without the externality of the production of undesirable gases, that demand would be an incentive for private entities to finance and carry out the research, development and installation of the necessary facilities. Apparently this is not the case. Historically, the private national railroad system was financially encouraged by the federal government. It wasn't a given that the postal system should be a government monopoly but so it is, although now in an abbreviated form. The telephone network could have easily been a national project but it's not, even though both the post office and the telephone system were substantially designed by the same person, Theodore Newton Vail. The Interstate Highway System, encouraged by Eisenhower as a necessity for national defense, is a federal project carried out by private contractors. Electrical power and automobile production have been heavily regulated by the federal government but remain in the hands of corporations, although one could make the case that the tax and regulatory position of the government makes it a co-owner.
The federal government, through its bureaucracies, steers research that takes place in academia. In the case of CAGW the research financed by government and the population through taxes already assumes that climate change produced by fossil fuels is a fact. If this is true, what more research into its validity is needed? Of course, there isn't any. The only research needed now is in the most effective way to replace reliable fossil fuels with renewables.
Perhaps one could make the case that showering funds on research into renewable energy among a host of academic institutions is most likely to produce the technology needed. This would be a new approach to previous efforts. An example would be the Manhattan Project, a concerted effort by the defense department itself to develop an atomic bomb. While sequestering CO2 is different than blowing people to smithereens, it seems to have a similar existential role.
Since academia is to be the focus of the CAGW issue, what is its function? There are 2 divisions of the function. One is research into the physics of the problem itself, which is delineated in research from over 100 years ago by Swedish savant Svante Herrenius, who, among others, promoted the connection between CO2 and a warming climate. No further research seems to have changed anything in his analysis. The second function would be the design of the equipment needed to address the problem. This is an engineering task, using established physics,chemistry and materials science to create that equipment. Companies that make similar equipment hire educated engineers to design it, then they build it. It's no longer the role of academia.
Portions of society may feel that awarding millions of dollars to research universities to solve engineering problems makes sense. It doesn't because that's not the role of universities, which is primarily education and secondarily research. It isn't applications engineering. An expensive mistake is being made in the attempted elimination of fossil fuels.
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