“The private sector will never do the amount of fundamental research that society’s interests require because you cannot tell in advance the nature of fundamental research…. The companies can’t tell whether there’ll ever be any return.”
– John Holdren, December 2017 Interview.
Less than one year ago, John Holdren, Obama’s beginning-to-end science adviser, and now Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, spoke of his concerns about Trump energy policy in a Climate One podcast from San Francisco.
Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added):
Government R&D as Savior
Holdren: “Well I think the biggest damage that the Trump administration is doing is first of all reducing or proposing to reduce very drastically investments in clean and efficient energy research and development by the government.…
“The impact of ethane is perhaps the most remarkable development in the remarkable story of the shale revolution. Less than three years ago, ethane was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil and gas drilling …. But today, ethane is feedstock for nearly half of U.S. plastics production and a valuable export to chemical companies around the world.”
– Jordan Blum, “How the Ethane Molecule Changes the Gulf Coast — and the World,” Houston Chronicle, September 15, 2018.
“Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.”
– Erich Zimmermann, resource economist (1951) [1]
Methane.…
“What we have done is … to put business in its broader political and cultural setting…. We are not out to defend business, but to try to do an impartial, scholarly investigation of an important American institution.”
– Henrietta Larson (1894–1983), Harvard business historian
For many decades, corporate histories were dominated by simplistic notions of big-is-bad and capitalist exploitation. Yes, Ida Tarbell documented many innovations and economies from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, but she jumped to examples to paint the Standard Trust as ultimately evil in its exploitation of competitors.
Much “Robber Baron” history followed in the decades after Tarbell, failing to comprehend the advantages of industrialization and to differentiate free-market entrepreneurship on the one hand from corporate/government cronyism on the other. As Harvard business historian Thomas McCraw would later explain:
…Without the benefit of a vocabulary that distinguished conceptually between center and peripheral firms, productive and allocative efficiency, vertical and horizontal integration, economies of scale and transaction cost, these observers had only their personal sensibilities and political ideologies to guide them.