commerce. As Prabhakar observes, “If you
wanted to make a caricature of it, you’d say
people [at the labs] are afraid to actually have
an impact. Over time the mission of a lot of
public funding and basic research has been
just to focus on publication, citations—which
are important but don’t suffice to meet soci-
etal needs.”
Another candidate in need of change is
American industry; though Cold War behe-
moths like IBM, McDonnell Douglas, and
General Dynamics once developed every-
thing from semiconductors to jet engines,
profiting from the process, they are no lon-
ger on the forefront of innovation. According
to Ilan Gur—former Arpa-E program man-
ager and the current head of nonprofit Acti-
vate, which offers fellowships at federally
funded labs to cleantech scientists to start
businesses—“Today’s industry is not incen-
tivized by Wall Street to do all the speculative
work to develop those technologies them-
selves.” Gur supports dramatically increasing
funding to Arpa-E, but he—and others—also
point out that we’ll need to entice big manu-
facturers to jump in as well. “The force multi-
pliers come from engaging industry—you’re
not going to win a lot of these games by just
sprinkling budget dust in at the early stages.”↙
AS POWERFUL AS GOVERNMENT CAPITAL CAN BE
in a time of international urgency, there are
also two relatively new sources of “budget
dust” that could help carry risky but nec-
essary technology over the ditch and into
the market.
The first is really a reinvention of another
Cold War idea: venture capital. The origi-
nal VC company, American Research and
Development Corporation, was formed in
1946 to invest in “noble” technology created
by the war effort. When that fund invested
$200,000 in a firm that made machines to
deliver radiation to cancerous tumors, one of
the VC founders, MIT president Karl Comp-
ton, observed that they didn’t expect the
company to make money, but the “ethics of
the thing and the human qualities of treating
cancer” made up for that. Then, almost acci-
dentally, the company—High Voltage Engi-
neering Company—turned out to be worth
$1.8 million when it went public in 1955. The
VC made even more money when another
investment, Digital Equipment Corporation,funding to Arpa-E and then have it work with
Darpa and the Department of Defense to
mount large-scale projects to develop things
like microgrids, advanced solar photovoltaic
cells, and energy storage facilities at military
bases and other properties. “It’s low-hanging
fruit,” she told me.
So how could this happen? First, the
president or Congress would need to define
carbon as an existential threat and make
decarbonization a general mission. Then,
task the military and the national labs—and
many other government agencies—with
committing resources to the rapid devel-
opment and deployment of technology to
accomplish the mission together.
Of course, getting government entities
involved in bringing technology to market
will require them to change the way they
approach their work. Consider another ven-
erable Cold War asset, the country’s net-
work of 17 national labs, which are part of
the DOE. While several of the national labs
have programs that match scientists with
money, mentors, and expertise to form start-
ups, in general the labs now focus on basic
research and try to stay above the fray ofSTART
to radically change the way they understood
jet engines, in a bid to make them much more
energy-efficient. As researcher John Alic
has documented, they went deep into the
physics of the machines, studying the way
air flowed over the blades and how metals
behave at high temperatures. They funded
basic research on rare earth magnets at uni-
versity labs and developed ceramic coatings
that are now standard for high-temperature
uses. With the Army spending billions of dol-
lars on research and then purchasing expen-
sive products that spun out of it—like Apache
helicopter blades—not only did jet engines
become more efficient and reliable, the pri-
vate sector adopted and built off of the new
technologies to create civilian products—like
that passenger aircraft, the turbines in gas-
fired power plants, and even the magnets
that run the electric windows in your car.
The US has wallowed in the politics of cli-
mate despair since the late 1990s, so it may
be hard to accept what I’m going to say next:
We could fairly quickly adapt our existing
federal technology innovation system to
work on the tech we need to decarbonize
energy at a scale that would have real impact.
(What’s more, by shifting innovation from
military applications to civilian ones, we’d
be building a country where war is no longer
necessary for economic growth. But that’s a
different conversation.)
As it happens, we’ve already successfully
cloned Darpa to create a civilian entity that
works exclusively on energy and the climate.
In 2009, Congress budgeted $400 million
to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-
Energy (Arpa-E) at the Department of Energy.
It even staffed it with former employees of
Darpa. Though it has a small budget (these
days, one-tenth of Darpa’s), Arpa-E is widely
considered a success. By 2018, the agency
had funded 660 early-stage energy inno-
vation projects, including innovative batter-
ies that could be used to back up renewable
energy on the grid, floating offshore wind
technology, and new systems for maintain-
ing advanced nuclear reactors.
It would not be hard to combine Arpa-
E’s early-stage development work with the
Department of Defense’s knack for scal-
ing technology into practical uses. Dorothy
Robyn, a former deputy undersecretary of
defense who is now a senior fellow at Boston
University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy,
argues that we should significantly increase
Getting the political
system to buy into
the reality of climate
change is still the
struggle that transfixes
the people who write
and worry about the
environment. Meanwhile
the climate itself has
moved on, and soon the
discussion will too.