Cos­mic Vari­ance is a blog that dis­cusses mostly physics related news and advances, noted an inter­est­ing study this morn­ing. The study ( PDF ) exam­ined the num­ber of patents granted for sulfur-dioxide con­trol tech­nolo­gies per year, not­ing at the points when major air con­trol leg­is­la­tion listed. The graph can be quickly summed up by say­ing that before the leg­is­la­tion was in place vir­tu­ally no patents were granted, going back to 1887. Post the Clean Air Act ( 1960 ) and the Clean Air Act Amend­ment ( 1970 ), the aver­age num­ber of patents going into 1995 is well over a 100 per year. The only rea­son­able expla­na­tion and the one that the study found was that gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions when they force pol­lu­tion to be more expen­sive than financ­ing R & D into lim­it­ing pol­lu­tion and imple­ment­ing those ideas, was more effec­tive than leav­ing it up to the marketplace.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, I per­son­ally am in favor of lim­it­ing gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion into the mar­ket­place. Any­one who has even worked with the gov­ern­ment on a lim­ited basis knows that all aspects of the gov­ern­ment are over reg­u­lated and lim­ited in terms of flex­i­bil­ity and inno­va­tion. Also gov­ern­ment enti­ties can’t sim­ply assume new duties or go in a new direc­tion as Google or most com­pa­nies can, instead they have to receive approval via a leg­isla­tive body gen­er­ally or an order from one of the other branches of gov­ern­ment. This com­bined with the cur­rent polit­i­cal atmos­phere leads to a an almost snails pace in terms of the gov­ern­ment mak­ing changes. Also has been seen numer­ous times, our rep­re­sen­ta­tives in gov­ern­ment aren’t not always knowl­edge­able in all areas in which they are required to cast votes and make deci­sions on. Nor should they be, we have experts from both sides of an issue to han­dle this. Politi­cians should be good at one thing lis­ten­ing and weigh­ing the mer­its of an argu­ment and reach­ing a con­sen­sus, in short a good politi­cian should be likened to a good judge. Cur­rently I would argue that this doesn’t occur often enough.

So why here is the gov­ern­ment an effec­tive mech­a­nism, when the major­ity of the times they sim­ply cre­ate more prob­lems or are too far behind to be of much use? The main rea­son is that in this and other related areas the mar­ket­place looks at the con­se­quences of pol­lu­tion and doesn’t see too many intrin­sic rea­sons to invest in green tech. This appears to be chang­ing as both the idea of global warm­ing is becom­ing more real­ized to peo­ple, and green tech­nol­ogy is one of the fastest grow­ing trends in engi­neer­ing across the board. This is not to say that the mar­ket­place is wrong, it’s sim­ply that the mar­ket­place as an inher­ent part of it’s design only exam­ines things in the very short time frame. A long term project at most com­pa­nies is some­thing with a time span of 4 – 6 years. Look­ing at the effects of putting sul­fur into the air 50 or more years into the future is sim­ply not a fac­tor for businesses.

Gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion becomes a nec­es­sary fac­tor when the mar­ket­place will not solve prob­lems or the prob­lems become some­thing that must be looked at decades into the future. This is espe­cially impor­tant given that the US is cur­rently in oppo­si­tion to a global agree­ment on cuts on global green­house emis­sions. While I would argue that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has some log­i­cal points, the lack of India and China is one such exam­ple. Over­all how­ever if change is to occur it has to start on some sort of level. And given that Bush recently agreed that cli­mate change was a real prob­lem and that a goal was needed on green­house gases, it seems silly to reject reg­u­la­tion in this area. Politi­cians all the time have to work with imper­fect laws that aren’t exactly what they want or that always have no draw­backs for their con­stituents, that is the nature of a rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment, not every­body gets what they want.

P.S. To those of you who would argue that global warm­ing is not real, you would at least agree that all the crud we throw up into the air can’t be good for at the very least the health and safety of humankind. The major­ity of pol­lu­tants are also dan­ger­ous to humans. I would also encour­age you to read the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change, before respond­ing as that is widely con­sid­ered one of the most recent and author­i­ta­tive stud­ies on the matter.

Update ( 15 Dec. 2007. 1. 01 am) The US just agreed to a deal at the Bali Con­fer­ence which I men­tioned ear­lier, no clue yet what the total agree­ment is.

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