Breakthrough Blog

Recently, the Breakthrough Blog has had some really good posts.

Some of the points are not very complicated. They are constantly harping on the need for investment, not just raising taxes. In the latest such article, they rag on Friedman and praise Bruce Bartlett, who wrote an op-ed in the NYT and was an economist in the Bush I administration. Actually, I really like it when they parse the things people are saying for me because otherwise I can't tell the difference between what they are saying. While it is good that people in the sustainability and environemental and green tech community feel solidarity, it feels like we are all on a honeymoon. We all get along and we all agree and sort of ignoring where our own differences are since we obviously all have greater differences with everyone else. The problem is that we should be hammering out our differences and making decisions on what courses of action to recommend and how to collectively sell these courses of action to everyone else.

The previous blog post is an article by a guy who believes that boosting R&D will be a waste of money unless there is also a carbon tax.

Post on why excessive focus on Energy Efficiency may set us back if there is not enough focus on Investing in Developing and Deploying New Technolgy.

This post features an article by MIT professor David Skinner on reviving Active Governmental Policy in an Economic Crisis. It's very long, and I don't really know what it's saying.

I really like this post, though, by Ron Hira, a professor at RIT. It is about the importance of creating "sticky" jobs, jobs which stay in the United States. He warns that we should not assume that jobs in innovation and engineering are going to be local.