Jeremy Wiesen
9/13/2010
The term “industrial policy” should not be seen as a pejorative. Wiesen notes that it certainly isn’t in China. Nor should it be anathema for the US government to provide capital and other incentives to keep scientific and entrepreneurial talent at home, give aggressive trade assistance, and incubate new businesses. China’s government incubates business with capital and other incentives. So should America’s. Wiesen argues that we need to develop dynamic new businesses to prove American-style capitalism isn’t second-rate.
Wiesen is a professor of entrepreneurship (emeritus) at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Robert J. Samuelson
Charles Krauthammer
Bill McKibben
David Brooks
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Bryce says the Kerry-Lieberman energy bill would be a waste of money for carbon capture and sequestration. He says there are three technological hurdles that are potentially insurmountable: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move newly captured carbon dioxide is insufficient; and there is a staggering volume of waste. He looks at each hurdle in turn and why they present problems to the bill. Before Congress throws money at the procedure, lawmakers should look closely at the issues of cost and scale that hamstring nearly every new energy-related technology.
Currently, nuclear power plants supply about one-fifth of the nation’s energy. And no member of the public has ever been injured by a nuclear power plant in the United States, nor has any nuclear worker died of a radiation-related incident. California would have to remove more than half a million passenger cars from its roads to eliminate the amount of carbon dioxide prevented by the state’s four nuclear reactors. The two reactors in Georgia will create an estimated 3,500 jobs during construction and 800 permanent jobs when the reactors are up and running. In California, where a state moratorium on new reactors has been in place since 1976, a majority of residents responding to the most recent California Field Poll on nuclear energy approved of building new reactors. Countries such as France, Japan, and Britain already have made great strides in extracting unused energy from used nuclear fuel, at the same time reducing the amount and longevity of waste byproducts. By employing advanced recycling techniques, advanced fuel fabrication, and new reactor designs, we could turn what is now considered waste into one of our most valuable future energy resources.
