↙
RIGHT ABOUT NOW, PEOPLE USUALLY START
to mouth the phrase moon shot—in homage
to the taxpayer-funded innovation binge that
started in 1961 and ended in 1972, organized
around the discrete goal of putting a man
on the moon and bringing him safely home.
Whenever Americans pine for new ways to
solve problems, that’s the go-to nomen-
clature: Google X wanted a moon shot; the
NIH has a cancer moon shot; environmen-
talists and labor created an “Apollo Alliance”
in 2003. Little wonder that the moon shot
is so attractive in hindsight: It had a sin-
gle, clearly stated goal; it united Americans
during a decade of upheaval; it resulted in
one giantly successful step; and it spun off
other advances. But in a way, the cult of the
moon shot actually understates what govern-
ment can do. A decade, the lesson seems to
be, is about as long as the American public
can stand to bankroll its geeks and wizard-
esses to make gizmos.
To get to net-zero emissions, though, we
need not one decade but many. And the task
of truly reducing emissions while coping
with a changing planet is vastly murkier
than depositing a human on a rock. First
we need to mightily improve the nascent
technologies underlying electric vehicles,
energy efficiency, and advanced renew-
able energy storage—and get them into
general use. At the same time, we have to
foster technology that is in earlier stages
(like carbon capture, fuel cells, and sus-
tainable biofuels) out of labs and into large-
scale demonstration projects where they
can be tested and tinkered with until they
can be scaled up. Finally, we need to explore
and develop tech that’s barely visible on the
horizon, like new types of nuclear reactors
and methods of capturing carbon directly
from the air. And as we go along, each tech-
nology will bring its own challenges, while
new crises arise, literally, from the atmo-
sphere. We have to be ready for that.
We’re talking about at least 30 years of
taxpayer-led investment in innovation, prob-
ably more. This is no moon shot; this is an
entire cold war. In fact, the Cold War itself is
a very useful and instructive precedent for
anyone who wants to bring the full might
of the US government to bear on a warming
planet. “The planners who started to con-
tend with the Cold War didn’t know what it
was and how long it would take, and yet they
committed resources to dealing with it,” says
Daniel Sarewitz of the Consortium for Sci-
ence, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State
University. “It’s similar to the emergent issue
of the climate—where we’ll ultimately man-
age it with many technologies rather than
solving it with a single one.”
An era of government-led technological
innovation, modeled after the loose bipar-
tisan consensus over the strategy of con-
tainment that guided us in the Cold War,
would be equal to the task of cooling the
planet. Not only that, but the complex fed-
eral machinery that delivered some of the
greatest innovations of the mid-20th cen-
tury is still lying around, waiting to be fired
up and duly aimed.↙
IMMEDIATELY AFTER WORLD WAR II
ended, funding for military technology fell
dramatically. Nuclear weapon and jet engine
development slowed, while US troops in
South Korea, outfitted with obsolete weap-
ons, suffered defeats that inspired the mil-
itary to get directly involved in research.
Vannevar Bush, who had been the director
of the wartime Office of Scientific Research
and Development, argued in a 1945 report
titled “Science—The Endless Frontier” that
American peace and prosperity required sig-
nificant government investment in innova-
tion. Bush advocated heavy spending on
curiosity-driven science in university labs
as well as funding for federal laboratories
like those that had been part of the Man-
hattan Project. Under the existential threat
of nuclear war, US leaders embraced Bush’s
vision of science, combined with military
development of technology, as a path for-
ward in an uncertain time.
The Cold War inspired the creation of sev-
eral key publicly funded organizations, many
of them military, that have reconfigured the
nation’s economy, and the world’s, through
a series of transformative technology booms.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (Darpa), which was founded by Pres-
ident Eisenhower in 1958 as a response to
Sputnik, has been credited with laying the
groundwork for the internet, Wi-Fi, super-
computing, desktop computing, GPS, robot-
ics, artificial intelligence, drones, and voice
recognition. Through the ’50s and ’60s, theDepartment of Defense learned how to best
use its position as a primary customer to spur
industries to create better and more innova-
tive technologies—a process that has brought
to market three of the most important energy
technologies of the past century: nuclear
power, sophisticated and efficient turbines,
and solar photovoltaic tech. (The depth of the
military’s influence on the US economy is so
profound that, to understand its role, I found
myself reading an economics book titled Is
War Necessary for Economic Growth? The
answer was, with some qualifications, yes.)
As Arati Prabhakar, who led Darpa from
2012 to 2017, explained to me, “We are very
good at innovating in this country for the
things that we set out to innovate for in 1945:
national security, which led to changes in
information technology, and health, which
became biomedicine. And I don’t think it’s
an accident that that’s what we’re good at
now—because those were precisely the
things that we focused on.”
The military has been successful at creat-
ing tech for a few reasons: As Prabhakar sug-
gested, it sets priorities for problems it wishes
to solve and then pursues multiple techno-
logical pathways. What’s more, it perseveres
without caring excessively about costs.
Take Darpa itself. According to MIT’s Bill
Bonvillian, who has studied the agency’s role
in innovation for more than two decades,
Darpa’s greatest advantage is its uniquely
nimble, collaborative, mission-driven cul-
ture, where managers move back and forth
between research and application, creat-
ing communities among researchers and
industry. “In most R&D agencies, the criti-
cal decision is awarding the grant,” he says.
“In Darpa, the managers award the grants
and then move into the researcher’s home.”
In addition to providing what econo-
mists call the “technology push” by fund-
ing foundational science through Darpa,
the military also excels at creating a
“demand pull” by partnering with industry
to develop the products, mounting large-
scale demonstration projects, and being an
early-adopting customer with deep pock-
ets. Many of these innovations have made
their way into civilian life.
Every time you board a 737, for example,
you are experiencing the result of the Army’s
demand pull in the world economy. In the
early ’60s, Army and NASA engineers set out
on a program of basic and applied research