In the US, Charles Brush manufactured arc lights and other electrical items. His business was bought by Edison and became part of GE. Brush held many patents and built a power producing wind turbine in 1888 and it operated for 20 years.

http://www.telosnet.com/wind/20th.html

In the 1920s he helped his son start another firm that specialized in beryllium products, Brush-Wellman. It still exists today in Cleveland.

Interestingly, Mr. La Cour used his turbine to make hydrogen gas and then repeatedly blew the windows out of his school.

Jobs: The jobs aspect doesn’t account for how many jobs will be destroyed by mandates from the church of global warming, which will be far more than 40 million – a net loss.

Competitiveness: When you say we gave up our lead on solar cells to japan, german, denmark, and China, what you’re saying is we decided to let them bare the cost of R&D. Now what can we learn from that? We can learn that wind mills kill birds and solar will never be enough to sustain us. What’s next? Let’s start talking about the nuclear option.

Freedom: How do you impose your convoluted version of this “freedom” on the Chinese and the rest of the world? Or do you just want to bankrupt the US so China can take us out entirely?

Family: No, the down side isn’t that we’ve left our kids a better world, it’s that we’ve thrown trillions of dollars down a hole for no reason. And in thirty years when the sun calms down and the climate cools on its own naturally, you jackasses are going to claim that you were right and we’ve started to “fix” it.

Well I’m calling BS on all of it. You want to fix the environment, use your own damned money. NOT tax money.

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Somebody needs to review the history of the Internet. For the first 25 years of its existence, the Internet was a govt funded/subsidized “research sandbox”. That’s right — from the “birth” of the Internet in 1969 (when two computers were networked together) to 1994, the Internet was gov’t funded. In the early days of the internet, the private sector did not show much interest in “over the horizon” technology such as packet-switching communication schemes. Once the Internet matured technologically under government sponsorship, the private-sector picked up the ball and ran with it.

New technologies often require both public and private funding — public funding to start things up, and then later, private funding to apply the new technology.

One of the singular achievements of government in the past three decades is to regulate us towards much cleaner water and air while promoting the greatest economic engine of any country in the world.

BTW, Bill is not a politician. Not sure where you got that idea.

All major infrastructure advances in this country have occurred thanks to government action or regulation — the railroads, the electric grid, the highways, the internet. Same will be true for a low-carbon energy system.

You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth; typical for a politician.

Government regulation/subsidy and entrepreneurial opportunity don’t go hand-in-hand. You’re no dummy, either, so I know you know this, even if perhaps you don’t have any real world experience in getting a company or product off the ground.

Joe won’t comment when I ask him specifically about this either, so I guess that’s par for this course.

You guys say on the one hand that you’re for all these technological ‘fixes’ – and I’m also as brightly optimistic about technology as you say you are – but it sounds like you aren’t really all that optimistic in the final analysis if you think it all needs to be forced and propped up by government sticks and carrots.

Ask people like Sam Walton where they’d be if government had stepped in to ‘help’.

And take another look at that moral high ground you’re talking about. It may be you’re just standing on a stump.