> Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe?
Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. This goes double for problems which have no clear solution. Even if you technically know how to solve a problem, if that technique is not profitable then it's literally not worth solving.
One example: Supersonic Commercial Travel. We have supersonic jets, and we have people who want to travel faster, so why isn't Boeing throwing billions of dollars into supersonic jets? Among other reasons (e.g. they are a nuisance), it's because it's not profitable yet.
Imagine you’re Google and you have a tech ready & demonstrated to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, say, with 30% the binding energy required that’s gained by burning fossil fuels to CO2. You keep innovating and stay ahead of the competition, using 5% of profits or such. Now go 20y into the future and USGov starts waking up to the mess they’ve creates. Miami is about to sink, Hurricanes are eating deep into their budget and Methane released from Sibirian traps is making it worse every year. The solar cycle is almost unrecognizable, every year is now El-Nino. China has ther own sequestration tech going and is net carbon negative, Europe is trying but failing, and all the world is screaming at the US to stop fucking around and do something. Who do you think they’ll throw all their money at? This kinda tech would be their license to print money. A nice percentage of everyone’s carbon tax.
Your scenario is one of many (infinite) possible scenarios and a probability can be put on it. In the context of your example, my point is that Google needs to be confident that their math works out such that them inventing (hiring, R&D) and implementing (infrastructure) the carbon machine is profitable for their business. Unfortunately, they are a business, not a charity, so they'll have to be selling their new carbon tech eventually. If no one will buy it, then it won't be done, because it would have to be done at a loss.
Back to real life, Google doesn't provide search because it makes the world a better place. Google provides search at the scale that they do because they had a clear business model and an incentive to do so. In an alternate reality, if it turned out nobody clicked ads, then Google would probably not exist at the scale that it does. Ten years ago, some decision to build 50,000 more processing servers would have been rejected by the board because they would have deemed it unprofitable.
The profits a company makes gives them the ability to make a choice on where to expand. If they keep expanding into avenues that do not return profit, they will be given fewer of these choices -- and will eventually go bankrupt.
Well atleast Gates invested in Carbon Engineering which does exactly that.
At the moment they estimate it to cost between $94 and $232$ to pull 1T CO² out of the air. [1]
So atleast someone is playing that game already, same with Ocean Cleanup Drones etc. etc. Lot's of people try to use market forces to save the planet, and Big Tech Co's are investing in that space, but it's not something where one can expect results in less than a decade.
The Carbon Engineering story is interesting, because it politely but firmly shows an earlier claim from an APS study about the economics of direct air capture was just bad. The APS study made some bad engineering choices and other mistakes and wrongly concluded DAC would have to cost $600/ton of captured CO2.
Well, an alternative explanation is that your premise is wrong.
No scientist believes that global warming is as bad as you are making it seem.
Yes, it will cause trillions of dollars in damages over the next century or so, as sea levels go up by a couple feet.
But that is hardly the end of the world, as you are making it seem. For example, Miami is not predicted to disappear, in a mere 20 years, as you imply.
The actual negative effects of global warming are closer to being within an order of magnitude of badness to an Iraq war, in a century, than is it to being an extinction event.
There are no negative predictions especially nor 1000 years out, and asking for them shows a complete lack of understanding of how prediction science works.
Nevertheless: And the researchers say this means the probability of the ECS being less than 1.5°C—the Paris Climate Agreement’s super optimistic goal beyond the 2°C goal—is less than 3 percent. The upside, though, is they say this new estimate means the probability of the ECS passing 4.5°C is less than 1 percent.
Well, the IPCC doesn't think that, and also doesn't believe that we are going to get to 6 degrees C of warming.
The predictions that I follow are not the pop doomsday predictions made on the internet. It is instead the predictions made by the official government experts on climate change.
Also, all of this is definitely not predicted to happen within 20 years. actually bad effects are predicted more like 200 years+ from now. Which is plenty of time, if you just look at how much the human race has accomplished in the previous 200 years.
>> Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business.
Can you say this is true about Tesla and/or SpaceX? It doesn't particularly seem like Elon cared about those things all that much when he launched them.
It doesn't need to be said for Musk, since a visionary entrepreneur is the exception, not the rule. Musk's choices can be explained away -- a smart domain expert like Musk probably has a better understanding of the risks and rewards in his domain of work than most other people. There are always exceptional people in the world who can not only imagine futures, but make them reality.
Hiring a think tank to solve a problem is a brute force search; almost like a random walk in the solution space. That's a huge risk for someone with lots of money and no domain expertise, but perhaps less a risk for an Einstein who has relevant knowledge and skills. Lots of solutions were found in the proverbial garage, and perhaps would have never been the product of a billion dollars and the best MIT grads you could hire. Nonetheless, spontaneity is, by definition, not something you can really throw money at and expect to happen. Even a trillion dollars will not help you find the next Einstein who can solve the exact problem you are working on.
Well, I think I have to disagree with a couple of points here.
First, Musk is not a domain expert in building rockets (by no means deminishing SpaceX technical achievements) nor in building cars (which is showing itself clearly as of late).
Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge. SpaceX itself is not a real moon shot (figuratively speeking, literally they are) but rather catching up with 60s and 70s space tech. And electrical cars have been around since the 1900s, so again nothing resembling a moon shot. Automotive mass production on the other hand is a very well understood problem space, one Tesla failed exploit so far in any meaningful way so far.
My main point was actually that Musk is not really worth mentioning here at all, because the vast majority of businesses do not operate like Musk's. The adjectives I used to describe Musk are not relevant here.
> Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge
"Easy to solve" means something different for a scientist, engineer and businessman. Something which can be theoretically or technically solved may not be practically solved (the supersonic commercial jet example I mentioned earlier). I agree with you that most of the time, it's pretty clear whether or not something will require new science or can be built with existing knowledge, and most business are in the business of doing the latter. I would add that new science is capable of turning impractical solutions into practical ones, and a multi-billion dollar business can spend easily spend unpredictable amounts of money trying to do so -- which makes it a very risky investment.
Businesses can also fail at implementing existing solutions and burn huge amounts of mones trying to do so.
And yes, Musk is relevant in a discussion about SpaceX and to degree Tesla. Have both endevours been "visionary" to a certain degree? Sure. At SpaceX I'd agrue that it was not Musk himself who designed, say, the Falcon 9 all by himself. Sure his education and background helped a lot.
At Tesla, the approach was disruptive as well. Especially tackling the lacking charging infrastructure as well. That gave him a huge head start, mass-production cost a lot of that head start already. SpaceX profited a lot from vertical integration, Tesla did not. Seeing Musk as some kind of genius in everything he does is doing two things, none of them good: 1) Reinforcing Musks pre-existing sense of superiority (again, based to a not inconsiderable amount in truth) to levels that are hurting and 2) making people an approach that worked once (vertical integration at SpaceX for example) will work elsewhere as well.
This is in effect suppressing diferent opinion and the free exchange of ideas. Reality usually punishes you for that at one point or another. And it would really be a pitty if either one, Musk, Tesla or SpaceX would be in the future.
You're setting up a straw man; the original discussion I started was never about Elon Musk in particular; I used him as an example to make a completely different point. Seeing as there's some baggage around Musk that is preventing you from seeing my point, please pretend I mentioned someone other than Musk to make my point (Edison, Ford, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc.). Musk was not actually relevant to my discussion at all, unless you're hijacking it to start a new discussion about Musk.
Yes, you can. There were existing high-value ($100B/$1T+) markets before either of those companies started.
Focussing on SpaceX specifically, Musk has always been clear that his business goal was to provide space transport at 10% the current cost. There's a story that he'd worked out (based on his existing rocket-building knowledge) that it seemed entirely practical to build a rocket for far less than going rate - on a plane while flying back from Russia. He had a business case before he spent his first dollar.
There's obviously remaining uncertainty but it would be foolish to start a project without some idea of how you'd profit.
Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. This goes double for problems which have no clear solution. Even if you technically know how to solve a problem, if that technique is not profitable then it's literally not worth solving.
One example: Supersonic Commercial Travel. We have supersonic jets, and we have people who want to travel faster, so why isn't Boeing throwing billions of dollars into supersonic jets? Among other reasons (e.g. they are a nuisance), it's because it's not profitable yet.