Politics can be frustrating at the best of times. The challenge is avoiding despair and feeling helpless. This is especially true when thinking about US energy policy.

We have the intellectual and financial means to remake our energy system. The question is, can we make it happen in a political system biased against public investment.

Marty Hoffert, professor emeritus of physics at New York University, addresses the limitations of the private sector in an op-ed piece on the Nature News site:

The idea that private-sector entrepreneurship can do the job alone is based on a myth. It took 30 years of government funding of the Internet by the military research agency DARPA and the National Science Foundation before Wall Street discovered that there was money to be made out of it.

The private-sector-alone approach is a prescription for disaster, and displays abysmal ignorance of how the United States ended up with its current energy system. The US government made crucial investments in energy technology in the post-war years.

Hoffert’s reference to the Internet is especially relevant, because the information infrastructure is far less capital-intensive than the energy infrastructure.