Invention and Innovation

Vaclav Smil (2023).  Invention and innovation: A brief history of hype and failure.  MIT Press: Cambridge and London

1-2  Invention is a big umbrella that covers items belonging to four principal categories.  The first category comprises an enormous variety of simple handmade items … tools … axes … needles … saws … pottery … farm tools … wooden furniture …

Machines belong to the second category of inventions … windmills … oceangoing sailing ships … in the US … (… new vehicles are mostly SUVS, pickups, and vans)

the third category of inventions, new materials … steel … aluminum … glass … cement … plastics … carbon-based composites …

The fourth category of invention consists of new methods of production, operation, and management … economically rewarding … automated … information gathering and data processing

3  During World War II the terms calculators and computers were used for (mostly younger) women employed in tedious data entry and processing

3  innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas.  Accordingly, there could be plenty of invention without commensurate innovation

3  The MiG-29 and Su-25 were among the world’s best fighter planes ever deployed in combat

5  In 1991 … the USSR was suffering from many innovation gaps

5-6  the post-1990 economic development of China is the best recent, and historically unequaled, example of mass-scale innovation based on rapid appropriation of a wide variety of foreign inventions … legal transfers have been accompanied by wide-ranging and relentless industrial espionage … So far there have not been any … important, globally-embraced, and commercially rewarding Chinese contributions (although some might argue that Huawei should be included)

10  this book is a modest reminder of the world as it is, not the world of exaggerated claims or, even worse, the imaginary world of indefensible fantasies

11  The health and environmental impacts of prescription drugs are perhaps the most widely appreciated category of side effects in modern societies

11  No less remarkable has been the tolerance of the multiple side effects created by the invention of cars powered by internal combustion engines

11-14  Here I will adopt a more general approach to inventive failures by focusing on the fact that the flow of fundamental and enormously successful inventions that have created modern civilization during the past 150 years has been accompanied by a frustrating lack of progress in many key areas, as well as on the innovations that, to put it charitably, did not do as well as initially expected.  In this book I examine three notable categories of these innovation failures: unfulfilled promises, disappointments, and eventual rejections …

I start with … leaded gasoline … DDT … and … chlorofluorocarbons …

The next category of failed inventions … airships … nuclear fission … supersonic aircraft …

The final examples … high-speed travel in a vacuum … symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria … and … nuclear fusion

17  A better, safer, more equitable world will require many truly transformative inventions

19  Every solution of a complex problem … has its obverse

19-20  I have chosen what I believe are the three most prominent examples of what turned out to be unacceptable solutions to important, common, and, if they were to remain unaddressed, harmful and costly problems … tetraethyl lead and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane … dichlorodifluoromethane … leaded gasoline … Freon-12 … DDT … the first modern synthetic insecticide

21-22  When lead was first added to gasoline there was plenty of convincing evidence of its insidious neurotoxicity, and the new product was met with near-instant resistance by a number of physicians and physiologists … In contrast, Freon-12 was a new synthetic compound that did not exist in nature and that, fortuitously, appeared to be quite unreactive when accidentally released into the environment, making it a perfect choice for household refrigerants … Similarly, there was no previous experience with DDT because prior to its deployment we had only such natural insecticides as citrus and eucalyptus oils or water solutions of salts or neem oil … and even if the first toxicological studies had been done far more extensively and rigorously, they would not have uncovered the long-term cumulative effects on bird reproduction

22  The most encouraging lesson common to the history of these three notable failures has been our ability not only to come up with better alternatives but also to devise practical international arrangements to make the bans and substitutions effective (with some notable breaches) on a global scale

23  The history of tetraethyl lead [TEL] is … the story of failed public health measures … CFCs and DDT carry different, much more sobering but also expected lessons: human interventions in Earth’s environment often carry delayed, complex risks

26  The higher the octane rating of gasoline, the more resistant the fuel is to knocking, and engines can operate more efficiently with higher compression ratios

26  During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol … as a gasoline additive … But three disadvantages complicated ethanol’s large-scale adoption

28  by 2020 high-volume US production of ethanol (used as an antiknocking additive) continued to be based on fermenting corn: in 2020 it claimed almost exactly one-third of the country’s corn harvest

29  TEL … Worst of all, and truly unpardonable, has been the denial of any possible health concerns.  This effort began with [Charles] Kettering’s insistence on the inaccurate naming of the additive (“ethyl gas”), which deliberately avoided acknowledging the presence of lead.  This heavy metal, known for its toxicity since Greek antiquity … But GM and its TEL suppliers were not just engaged in disregarding lead’s health effects, they made resolute and repeated claims aimed at minimizing or even entirely dismissing any concerns about the health effects … GM and DuPont claimed, without doing any studies, that the average street would likely be so free from lead that it would be impossible to detect its absorption … GM, DuPont, Standard Oil, and Ethyl Corporation framed the use of TEL as a necessity required to ensure the industrial progress of the country

31  The American standard for producing leaded gasoline … made it possible to develop more powerful, faster, and more reliable reciprocating aeroengines, machines that reached the peak of their performance during World War II

34-35  The rise of US ethanol began in earnest in 2005 … and in 2020 blends of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol (known as E10) accounted for more than 95 percent of all fuel used by the country’s gasoline vehicles

35  The mass-scale introduction of tetraethyl lead … provided a quick and dirty solution to an important technical problem, and because it enabled higher engine efficiencies … it resulted in lower relative emission rates … but much larger car fleets composed of heavier cars erased these relative gains

35  the misleading label of ethyl gasoline, had its worst cumulative effect on children … lead causes neurobehavioral deficits even in extremely low doses

36  it is hard to avoid the conclusion that few innovations that were initially extolled as perfect solutions to a technical problem caused so much avoidable deprivation on the individual level

40  Rachel Carson … book … Silent Spring presented the use of DDT as one of the most consequential human interferences in the natural order of things, and the book was intended to make the widest possible public impact

42  DDT kills and harms in many ways

44-45  raptors and fish-eating species have been most susceptible as a result of the bioaccumulation of DDT and DDE in fatty tissues … David Peakall … Ottawa … eggs from museum collections … hexane, and chromatographic analyses revealed the presence of DDE

45  the persistence of DDT means that some bird populations have yet to revert to normal eggshell thickness

46  By the end of the twentieth century more than fifty species of anopheline mosquitos had become DDT resistant, including those that are leading malaria vectors

47  DDT’s role in malaria control remains contested

49  Could it have been different if, from the very start, its use had remained tightly restricted to closely controlled antimalarial measures and the compound had never been used for the large-scale spraying of crops? … DDT became a victim of its early success

49  Refrigeration and air conditioning are perfect examples of ubiquitous technologies that are essential for the perpetuation of modern civilization

50-51  In 1860 Ferdinand Carré patented a refrigeration cycle using ammonia, and that compound, despite its own risks … became the preferred refrigerant in large industrial systems and remains so even today because it produces the best net refrigerating effect

51-54  Obviously, none of the “natural” refrigerants – flammable hydrocarbons, corrosive ammonia, toxic sulfur dioxide – offered a safe and highly acceptable choice for household refrigerators … chlorofluorocarbon compound … The concatenation of desirable CFC properties – stable, noncorrosive, non-flammable, nontoxic, and affordable – also made them the ideal choices for aerosol propellants … This resulted in an exponential rise in CFC production … And what was the fate of nearly 10 million tons of CFCs that had entered the atmosphere since the early 1930s?  Nobody knew – until … four decades after

55  Sherwood Rowland and … Mario Molina, linked chlorine in CFCs directly to ozone destruction … Chlorine destroys ozone then is released to start a new cycle of destruction, and a single atom of the gas can destroy on the order of 100,000 ozone molecules before it is eventually removed from the stratosphere by downward diffusion and reactions with methane … the stratospheric ozone has been essential for the evolution of higher forms of life

56  This ozone shield is transparent to all longer wavelengths of ultraviolet … radiation (UVA …) … But stratospheric ozone shields the biosphere from the shortest … wavelength of UVB

57  inaccurately, known as the … “ozone hole.”

60  global warming potential (GWP)

60  The third generation of refrigerants vastly reduced or entirely removed the ozone problem but contributed to greenhouse gas emissions

61  By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US

61  In the context of the unfolding preoccupation with global warming, choosing low-GWP fluids is imperative

63  James Maxwell’s formulation and development of the theory of electromagnetic waves … between 1865 and 1873 … provided the foundation of all modern wireless electronics

63  the first patent for a solid-state electronic device, granted to a German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first in Canada in 1925 … John Bardeen and Walter Brattain … followed by William Shockley … the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956

64-65  I have selected three prominent examples of these unfulfilled – or at least grossly underfulfilled – early hopes … Airships … nuclear fission … supersonic flight

66  lighter-than-air (LTA) flying machines

67  The history of LTA flight began with adventures in ballooning … 1783, Joseph-Michel and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier

72  the Douglas DC-3 – introduced in 1935 and destined to become the most common and most durable piston-powered airplane in history

72  By the time it was grounded, in June 1937, the Graf Zeppelin had flown 1.7 million kilometers, carried more than 13,000 passengers, completed 144 intercontinental trips, and spent 717 days – nearly two years – aloft, all, despite some in-flight mishaps, without an injury to its crew and passengers

73  The last minutes of this catastrophe … were filmed by at least five different news services … making it “the first media event of the twentieth century.”

73-74  World War II saw the return of military airships … the US was the only major power that used a large number of airships.  Goodyear’s K-series airships were dominant … The US Navy … airships patrolled nearly eight million square kilometers … and only one was shot down by a German submarine

74  any realistic prospects for commercial airships on inter-continental routes ended even before World War II, and they did so not because of the Hindenburg catastrophe but because of advances in airplane propulsion

78-79  In the US, recent domestic helium consumption has been about 40 million cubic meters a year, with major uses in magnetic resonance (30 percent), lifting gas (17 percent), and analytical and laboratory applications (14 percent).  If all of this annual use went into airships, it would be enough for about two hundred large (Zeppelin-like) structures.  The global resources of helium are estimated at about 50 billion cubic meters

80  World War II … all major belligerents (the US, USSR, Germany, Japan) pursued the development of nuclear bombs, only the US … succeeded before the war’s end

81  there was no compelling resource or environmental reasons to develop nuclear electricity … Why, then, did the US decide to build its first nuclear power generating station? … in early 1953 President Eisenhower agreed with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that “it would look very bad if the United States lagged behind” in commercializing nuclear electricity generation.  Politics, not economics, dictated the country’s development of nuclear electricity generation

82-83  Nautilus, the US Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, was built between June 1952 and January 1955 … The same reactor design was used for America’s first commercial nuclear project … Shippingport, America’s first fission power plant … began to generate electricity on December 18, 1957, nearly six months after the Soviet Obninsk plant and almost fifteen months later than the British Calder Hold plant

84  in December 1963 … the Jersey Central Power and Light Company concluded that its planned nuclear power plant at Oyster Creek would generate electricity less expensively than a coal-fired plant … New utility orders rose to … a total of eighty-three new reactors between 1965 and 1969 … But fission received by far its biggest boost in 1973 thanks to … the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) … by quintupling its posted crude oil price … in 1973 US utilities ordered forty-two new nuclear reactors

86  1974 … Utility managers, accustomed to count on a virtually guaranteed doubling of electricity demand in a decade and the completion of new large stations in five to six years, now found themselves with steadily declining demand and protracted construction periods

86-87  1979 … Three Mile Island … no radiation was released from the plant … Chornobyl … Ukraine … 1986.  Unlike all the American reactors, the Soviet-designed reactor had no containment building … Thirty-one people were killed almost instantly, 134 people were treated for acute radiation syndrome, and … detailed long-term health appraisals did not show any evidence of a higher overall cancer incidence or a higher mortality

88  In 2020 the world had 43 operating reactors

89  Japan … The meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi station in March 2011 led to the complete shutdown of all reactors

92  the post-1945 development of fission has been a “successful failure.” … Though the grand promises of a new epoch ushered in by a brilliant high-tech solution failed, nuclear generation has been a partial (if very expensive) success

92-93  reactors in Europe, the US and Canada have been operating with impressively high annual load factors … and have done so safely, without releasing any greenhouse gases or any harmful doses of radiation while lowering the mortality that would arise from generating similar amounts of electricity by coal-fired stations (because of their emissions of particulates and acidifying gases).

By 2022 there were two new powerful incentives to go nuclear: the quest for accelerated decarbonisation of the global electricity generation and Europe’s need to reduce its reliance on Russian energy … Nuclear realities still keep falling far short of the initial, truly transformative, promise

94  With the first jet fighters being almost transonic, it appeared … that these advances would be transformed to commercial airplanes … This mistaken belief in supersonic transport as the obvious next step in commercial aviation was promoted (for different reasons) by the governments of the UK, France, the US, and the USSR, and the resulting quest for its realization led to many failures, all costly, some brief, others prolonged

99  Why have all these ventures ended in failure? … America’s strategic thinkers would have earned their keep had they been more concerned about the establishment of Airbus Industrie on December 18, 1970, with France, Germany, and the UK getting together to produce new commercial jetliners.  That move eventually led to America’s second-best status

99  the two supersonic successes … the Concorde and the Tupolev … were in reality no such thing, just more or less protracted and much more expensive failures … most of the reasons for past failures have not been eliminated or resolved, and they will have to be faced by the most recent attempts to reintroduce supersonic flight

99  Four fundamental constraints are apparent: a plane design dictated by the need to overcome enormous drag, engines powerful enough to sustain M 2, accomplishing this economically, and doing so with acceptable environmental impacts

100  all modern jetliners cruise at about M 0.85

102  the Boeing 747 … revolutionized global passenger aviation

104-105  Boom Supersonic … plans to build the Overture, an M 2.2 plane for fifty-five people … these claims sound too good to be true

107-108  eliminating cancer or radically extending the human life span … are based on false premises … we have achieved many successes … The 2021 annual report prepared by the National Cancer Institute shows a declining mortality from eleven of the nineteen most common cancers in men … and fourteen of the twenty most common cancers in women … Most of the world’s affluent countries have actually achieved an impressive extension of the average pre-industrial life span … with the highest combined (male and female) longevity now at eighty-five years in Japan

108  I focus in this chapter on the ever-receding fulfillment of … technical pursuits … rapid-transportation … inside evacuated tubes … the second … to make cereal plants … act as legumes and secure most of their nitrogen requirements by symbiosis with bacteria rather than needing heavy doses of synthetic fertilizers … The last breakthrough with repeatedly delayed deadlines for convincingly demonstrating the commercial capability … concerns controlled nuclear fusion

120  No hyperloop line … was in operation by early 2020 … None of the system’s often repeated advantages … has been tested on even a single commercial project, and … remain in the category of wishful thinking

121  [Elon] Musk has trivialized many aspects of high-speed in-tube transportation

122  The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, at 57 kilometers the world’s longest

123  it will take a long time indeed before the first fare-paying travelers enter the pods … are accelerated to near-sonic speed, and arrive at the next station, hundreds of kilometers away in just minutes.  After more than two hundred years of such dreams, we are still waiting

123  Our understanding of the world and our well-being rest, to an insufficiently appreciated degree, on the scientific and engineering advances made between 1867 and 1914

124-125  1898 … William Crookes … “all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” … What was needed was to tap the unlimited supply of atmospheric nitrogen, to change the inert molecule (N2) that forms 80 percent of air’s mass into a reactive compound (preferably ammonia, NH3) that could be assimilated by crops and supply the macronutrient guaranteeing higher yields

125-126  In 1909 Fritz Haber … succeeded in synthesizing ammonia from its elements … and it was under the leadership of Carl Bosch, one of BASF’s most capable engineers, that Haber’s bench-top demonstration was converted rapidly into a full-scale industrial synthesis

126-127  Intensifying fertilization became a critical component of the Green Revolution that began to advance during the 1960s … Their benefits are indisputable: I have calculated that no less than 40 percent of the global population receive their dietary protein (directly from crops and indirectly from animal foodstuffs) from harvests that got nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia … however, this admirable solution has its drawbacks … more than half of the applied nitrogen … escapes … into the environment … This is … a substantial economic loss … and one that also causes major environmental problems … Reducing the fertilizer applications to the minima compatible with maintaining good yields is thus one of the foremost goals of modern agronomy

127-128  in contrast to nitrogen-hungry staple cereals, leguminous plants … do not need any, or need only minimal, fertilizer applications not only to produce good yields but to leave residual nitrogen in soils after harvest.  This difference has been known since antiquity … But they had no idea why it was so

128  Leguminous plants cannot themselves assimilate the free atmospheric nitrogen but obtain it through symbiosis with bacteria residing in their root nodules … (… Rhizobium) 

129  Rhizobium bacteria … thanks to nitrogenase, an enzyme made up of two proteins … that enable the reaction of hydrogen with nitrogen to form ammonia.  But this nitrogen biofixation has a high energy cost, and nitrogenase does not tolerate oxygen and becomes irretrievably inactivated in air, a reality complicating its possible transfers

129-130  might it be possible to induce cereals to behave as leguminous plants and fix all or most of the needed nitrogen through symbiosis with diazotrophs, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, attached to their roots? … The benefits of such a symbiosis would be obvious.  Cereal cropping would be more profitable … The environmental benefits of biofixation would range from much-reduced volatilization and leaching of applied fertilizers … to lowered emissions of greenhouse gases and better soils

130-134  There are three distinct strategies to bring nitrogen fixation to cereals.  The first and the most obvious approach … to replicate the arrangement common in legumes … Dobzhansky’s .. maxim … “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

And evolution … has not endowed a single nutritionally important species outside of the Leguminosae family with the capacity for symbiotic Rhizobium-driven nitrogen fixation …

The second option … is to enhance the activities of bacteria that might be present in the root zone of cereal plants … or to introduce diazotrophs into the plant tissues of nonleguminous crops …

The third path, the most radical and most ambitious one, is having the receptivity to symbiosis encoded as a permanent plant trait … The task is very difficult not only because many genes are involved in the process but because gene expression and the cellular components directing the processes are very different in bacteria and in plants … we must keep in mind … Transgenic crops have run into opposition from vocal green and organic lobbies arguing against any genetic modification of foodstuffs

135  Giles Oldroyd … how long it will take to get nitrogen-fixing cereals: “There is no answer to that.  We are working in the unknown.”

138  the quest for controlled nuclear fusion is attempting nothing less than to replicate the extreme circumstances that sustain the Sun’s enormous energy output and then use the resulting heat to generate electricity

138  the first fission weapon was tested in July 1945 … a fusion bomb … the first American test of a hydrogen bomb … in 1952 

140  to generate electricity.  What was required was a device that would keep plasma confined long enough to initiate nuclear fusion.  The easiest (a relative term in this context) way to achieve controlled fusion is to combine the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to form an isotope of helium

141  The two elements needed for controlled fusion are abundant: deuterium … and lithium … But future fusion plants will also need to generate their own tritium because this isotope is exceedingly rare in nature … This tritium generation would be done by capturing neutrons in a lithium blanket surrounding the confined plasma

141  Three conditions must be met to enable the highly energetic collisions of nuclei that make fusion possible: maintaining extraordinarily high temperatures, sustaining a plasma density high enough to increase the probability of nuclear collisions, and providing sufficiently long-lasting plasma maintenance required for continuous heat generation

141-142  the design of this experimental magnetic thermonuclear reactor … became universally known as tokamak, an acronym created from … the Russian term for toroidal chamber with magnetic coils, TOroidal'naya KAmera s MAgnitnymi Katushkami.

Other notable experimental designs … were … stellarator … and the Z-pinch … since 1970 about sixty large-scale conceptual controlled-fusion designs were developed, and more than one hundred experimental facilities were built  

144  Q, the ratio of the thermal power produced by deuterium-tritium fusion to the power injected into a fusion device … Q = 1 is the breakeven point … So far, the highest Q, 0.67, has been achieved by the European tokamak JET in the UK.  The record-size tokamak, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), is now under construction in France and should not only reach the breakeven point but surpass it considerably

146  one source claims that about 1 percent of global energy demand could be supplied by fusion by 2068 … During the past seven decades the world has spent at least $60 billion (in 2020 monies) on developing controlled fusion, but it remains perhaps the most stubbornly receding fata morgana on record: always to be reached after yet another thirty years  

146  The two key challenges are problems with containment and fuel assemblies and the large requirements for parasitic power

148  The entire field of cold fusion is now known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR)

151  what is true about the past is, despite recent claims to the contrary, likely to be repeated in the future … This cautionary attitude should be self-evident to any diligent student of modern technical advances – and so should be the basic attendant lessons

151-152  First, every major, far reaching advance carries its own inherent concerns … Second, rushing … may not be the long-term prescription for success … Third, we cannot judge the ultimate … success of a specific invention during the early stages … Fourth, skepticism is appropriate whenever the problem is so extraordinarily challenging

acknowledgments of reality and the willingness to learn … seem to find less and less acceptance in modern societies … news media often serve up patently false promises … characterizing this state of affairs as living in a postfactual society is, unfortunately, not much of an exaggeration

154  in 2022 about 60 percent of all electricity in general came from burning coal and natural gas

155  remarkably, even completely unsubstantiated claims are now wholesaled as facts

158  Michael Jordan, the world’s leading AI researcher … “People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends – that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans.  We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.”

159  our quest for AI is an enormously complex, multifaceted process whose progress must be measured across decades and generations and whose impressive achievements on some relatively easy tasks coexist with the much larger realm of intelligence that remains well beyond the capabilities of programmed machines

159  At this point I should address the question of progress and innovative speed more directly and support my conclusions regarding the lack of any broad-based rapid exponential growth of inventions with easily verifiable facts.  Fortunately, this is not a particularly difficult task

160  Most of the world’s undernourished children are in Africa … during the first two decades of the twenty-first century … the world’s fastest-growing and poorest continent has been falling further behind

161  classic example of electronics rise … we notice them far more, and perceive them to be disproportionately more important, than the unchanging or marginally evolving fundamentals of our lives

163  Reasoning with true believers – be they of religious or ideological persuasion or cornucopian techno-optimists – is not an option

164  the growth of the best processor performance has slowed … As with all cases of growth, an S-curve has been forming, and the period of very rapid exponential growth is history

164  rapid exponential growth has not marked the advances in either fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival – ranging from crop yields to efficiency gains in energy uses, from transportation speeds to the ability to design and complete large engineering projects – or the critical determinants of health and quality of life, including the rate of new drug discoveries and gains in longevity

165  the global share of people who remain undernourished … was declining … for a generation … but it has since risen to about 10 percent

165  whether we look at the increases in staple grain yields required … or at the performance of processes indispensable for the functioning of modern civilization, we see no signs of any rapid exponential advancement

166  battery designs … I cannot find any ever-accelerating growth in the performance of these portable energy storage devices in the past fifty years

167-168  cost of solar … photovoltaic (PV) cell prices … the overall costs of installation … show a distinctly declining rate of improvement … The real cost of PV panels should also include their dismantling and disposal or, preferably, their recycling

168-169  there is no indication of ever-faster inventions as far as the most fundamental human activities are concerned.  This inevitable conclusion is now supported by a detailed study of innovation across American industries spanning nearly two centuries, from 1840 to 2010 … the only industrial sectors with post-1970 peaks have been agriculture and food … medical equipment … and, of course, computers and electronic products … Perhaps the best way to appreciate this reality is to try to imagine the world without the benefits brought by the latest wave of innovation … To do so is quite easy as that was the world of the early 1970s

171  two overriding needs: to improve the fundamentals required for a dignified life of the world’s population, and to do so without excessive impacts on the biosphere

173  carbon dioxide and methane, the two leading greenhouse gases implicated in anthropogenic global warming

176-177  even if we got batteries whose energy density was an order of magnitude higher than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, their energy density would still be less than a quarter of the energy density of the refined liquid fuels … that now dominate all forms of transportation

177  That global warming will get worse before it gets better is a foregone conclusion

180  a completely carbon-free outcome will require many decades of gradual progress

181  there is yet another way to look at which inventions are needed most, with the priorities dictated by changing the prevailing state of affairs

181  Satisfying the water and food requirements of the entire global population does not depend on any new spectacular inventions … but rather determined innovation that would diffuse these benefits and reduce their costs

182  As for the good foundations of universal education, we know that that can be achieved without every child having a computer or without extraordinarily high spending

182  In the grand scheme of things, improving what we know and making it universally available might bring more benefits to more people in a shorter period of time than focusing overly on invention and hoping that it will bring miraculous breakthroughs … this is not an argument against the determined pursuit of new inventions, merely a plea for a better balance between the quest for … stunning future gains and the deployment of the well-motivated but still far from universally applied understanding and achievements

183  contrary to mistaken claims of the ever-faster pace of invention, nihil novi sub sole