In all seriousness, you're not helping. At all. Clearly R&D is doing well, but battery and other component prices are too high, while oil consumption has huge externalities that no one is ever forced to pay for. So yes, we're going to tax oil and pour the money into electrification of transportation. Get over it.
This is helping?
This is how you play into the politics of division. It's also how you make enemies and not get what you want as a result.
Don't play the combative divisiveness game. It's for suckers. It serves the politicians, it doesn't serve you.
Oil is non-renewable; it's getting much more expensive to find ; and the US (my country) spends a huge portion of its tax revenue financing a military to ensure a constant supply of said oil.
The shift to renewables is already well underway, whether the OP wants it to or not. I'm not being combative. On the contrary, I'm simply stating they should accept the inevitable.
I expect in 50 years we will still have personal cars, but I'm split on whether they will be running on batteries, or running on some liquid fuel that we manufactured from environmental carbon.
"Don't play the combative divisiveness game. It's for suckers. It serves the politicians, it doesn't serve you."
I wish someone would say this every time people start yelling at each other over political decision.
The downsides of petroleum are clear. Its polluting, its limited, and we fight regional (check that, global) conflicts over it. Electricity is cheap, it's price is dropping quickly as more capacity comes online (solar, wind, natural gas where fracking is occurring), and its able to be moved across wide geographic areas extremely quickly. There is no reason oil shouldn't be taxed and those funds driven directly into renewables and electrified mobility.
Now, if you want to argue with me on facts, I am all ears. But until someone can prove we're not running out of oil, prove that we don't need a military to patrol the regions we extract that oil from, and prove that our economy can continue to function with a cartel controlling the literal fuel of the world economies, get the hell out of the way.
(Note: that leaves ~100 billion in the defense budget, which is still more than any other nation on Earth spends except China).
But does anyone have hard facts of how effective they are at applied problem solving? Or do they just get lucky every once in a while and have good PR? In particular have they developed some better way to run R&D programs?
I don't know but my limited interaction with their program managers did not impress me but this is purely anecdotal.
What DARPA has is a lot of money without a lot of oversight. Don't underestimate the power of that model. If you look at the organizations that have been extremely effective at innovation, it's organizations where research isn't subject to market pressures. Bell Labs was bankrolled by AT&T's telephone monopoly. Xerox PARC was bankrolled by Xerox's extremely lucrative copier business. Intel, IBM, Google, etc. Innovation is associated with companies that have such tremendous market power that they can be benevolently forward-looking, instead of having to pinch every penny to survive in the dog fight that is a competitive market place.
Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" gives great insight into this aspect of the AT&T monopoly.
Thanks for pointing me to Tim Wu - very interesting analysis.