California has consistently been at the forefront of stringent regulations pertaining to cars, appliance standards, building codes, and emissions from fossil fuels.

Seems like the facts suggest that innovation and strict regulation go hand in hand, rather than being mutually exclusive.

We keep discovering this, over and over again. Of course, it takes the right kind of regulation — setting boundary conditions and performance standards rather than specifying technologies, but when they are properly structured, regulations don’t inhibit innovation, they stimulate it.

In fact, Harvard’s Michael Porter set out to show how destructive environmental regulation was to a state’s economy more than two decades ago. Along the way, he noticed a stubborn and perverse trend — some of the states with the most stringent regulatory standards were hotbeds of innovation and economic growth.

He became an advocate of intelligent regulation as an economic growth tool, not simply a means of controlling pollution.

Somehow, this wealth of empirical data on the compatability of regualtion, innovation, and economic growth needs to get out there, and we need to end this false narrative that regualtion and economic growth are mutually exclusive activities.

It seems that the “magic technological bullet” is the last defense of delayers. Some, like Gingrich and Lomborg, seem to know they are delaying — sadly, S&N seem blithely unaware that their phony narrative is aiding and abetting delayers who oppose real action on grounds of poltical persuasion or old fashioned greed.