The Dynamic Society

Where We Can Go

We got a glimpse of what American dynamism can achieve with the historic development of the COVID-19 vaccines. In the spring of 2020, the pandemic was inflicting mass illness and unconscionable death tolls across the world. With an important assist from the government’s Operation Warp Speed, American scientists turned out unprecedented vaccines in record time. This was a monumental triumph of science and ingenuity, both in the speed and effectiveness of the vaccines – and broke new ground by utilizing mRNA technology. This shows what America can achieve when it prioritizes scientific discovery and technological progress. 

We now need to double down on reaching new technological and scientific heights. Technological innovation holds the key to solving some of our most vexing problems, and enriching our quality of life. It’s the key to curing cancer and other diseases. It’s the key to preserving our climate and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the key to anticipating, preventing, and curing future pandemics. It’s the key to allowing us to travel more places more quickly, more cheaply, and more cleanly. It’s the key to letting more people live in greater comfort and security, with widespread prosperity.

Healthcare

Scientific and technological breakthroughs can secure a healthier future for all of us. First and foremost, keeping the pedal to the metal in biomedical research can enhance our protection against pandemics – both potential new COVID-19 variants, and future pandemics that may arise. Researchers are starting clinical trials of pancoronavirus vaccines, which could offer protection against a whole family of viruses. And COVID-19 nasal vaccines hold the promise of better protecting against infection by combating the virus at the threshold of our bodies. 

But science and technology are also working beyond the immediate pandemic threat.  Artificial intelligence technology can be used to detect breast cancer earlier than we ever imagined, increasing treatment options and improving survival. And mRNA technology – the same technology used in the COVID-19 vaccines – might be able to be used to create personalized cancer vaccines to block recurrences of cancer. 

Science is also poised to deepen our understanding of mental health. Researchers are discovering the power of psychedelics to treat serious mental illness. And cutting-edge biotechnology like CRISPR and gene therapy hold the promise of better comprehending and treating conditions like depression and schizophrenia. 

Transportation

When it comes to how we get goods and people around, gasoline-powered vehicles are poised to become a relic of the past. Electric passenger cars – both our own, and our taxis – on our streets will help eliminate fossil fuel emissions and improve the breathability and air quality in our neighborhoods. EVs will also enhance our energy independence and free us from unpredictable gas prices subject to the whims of authoritarian petro-states. EVs are also better-made machines that work better with fewer mechanical problems and costs.

Right now, high oil prices don’t just affect drivers and car-owners – they affect all of us. When the price of diesel rises, goods shipped by trucks get marked up to account for those increased costs – which means consumers have to pay more. But when we leave fossil fuel energy behind, we’ll increasingly rely on hydrogen-powered trucks to move goods around the country cleanly without emissions.

We may also be on the cusp of a revolution in air travel. Some day, we may take supersonic flights that let us speed across the country in just two hours. And those flights will be carbon neutral, powered by technology that captures CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into jet fuel. 

Construction

Construction is one of the foundational components of human civilization. Over the last century, humanity has made great advances in areas such as manufacturing, medicine, agriculture, telecommunications, and more. 

Construction has remained as labor intensive now as 1945 and productivity has actually decreased since the 1960s. Building construction speed has remained the same - if not gone down - since the 1930s. There have not been significant changes in the way we construct over the last century. 

Construction causes negative externalities - especially in urban areas such as New York - such as noise and air pollution. With a long overdue technological revolution in construction technology, these can be greatly reduced. 

Technology is being developed to create carbon-negative concrete – that is, concrete that serves as a carbon sink by storing more carbon than is produced during its manufacture. That could be a climate game-changer, since the cement industry is currently responsible for at least 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. (For comparison, aviation accounts for 2.5 percent of global emissions.) Novel construction technology utilizing 3D printing can also help reduce emissions by reducing material waste. New York City might be a concrete jungle – but it’s a jungle whose future will be built around clean concrete. 

Prefabricated construction - or building that is done off site - has been discussed and tried for centuries now. Prefabricated construction has been unable to scale due to logistical issues. As we continue to make progress in transportation and manufacturing, scaling prefabricated construction may be achievable in the next decade. Improved onsite construction technology can also revolutionize construction. Construction robotics, 3D printing, and augmented reality glasses can bring factory-like productivity to construction sites.

Agriculture and Food Systems

Eighteen percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and forestry with a majority coming from livestock. Cattle produce methane gasses as they digest food, significantly contributing to global warming. Additionally, agriculture and our food systems use precious natural resources such as water, land, and soil. 

Though many activists call on reducing meat consumption and  transitioning to plant-based diets to combat climate change, advancements in the way we raise livestock and farm may allow us to continue to enjoy the food and diets we eat. A recent study showed that supplementing feed with seaweed may reduce methane emissions from cattle by 82 percent.

Additionally, regenerative agriculture and aquaponics allow us to sequester carbon while producing food. Regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach to agriculture that utilizes tools such as crop rotation, cover crops, managed grazing, composting, and more, to increase soil health, biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve the water cycle. Aquaponics combines fish and plant production by utilizing fish waste to feed hydroponically grown plants which then purify the water that the fish live in. With investments in research and development, advances in biotechnology, genetic engineering, soil monitoring, artificial intelligence, and robotics we may be able to deploy these regenerative methods at the necessary scales to utilize our food production system to combat climate change. 

Startups and researchers are also discovering new ways to create clean meat and seafood from cell-cultures to reduce the environmentally-damaging and inhumane process of slaughtering animals for consumption. Additionally, “hybrid meats,” which take food waste to grow various types of  mushroom to blend with various types of meat and seafood, are being developed to reduce food waste and animal consumption. 

Energy

The United States of the future will run on clean energy. We can get off fossil fuels by going electric for everything – clean electricity generated from wind, solar, hydropower, advanced geothermal, and nuclear energy. By making that switch, we can leave behind the age of fuel efficiency in favor of energy superabundance that opens up limitless possibilities for our future economy. We must harness and deploy wind, solar, and advanced geothermal energy, while also utilizing steady energy sources like hydropower and next-generation nuclear (which is 99 percent safer and 99 percent cleaner than fossil fuels).

A clean energy transition is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change. While converting to zero-carbon energy sources must be our primary focus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recognizes that carbon capture and removal will also be essential. We must scale up carbon removal technologies that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

This is just a small taste of the technologies that may come to define the next 15 to 20 years, with many more on the horizon. Our future can be miraculous and awe-inspiring. We can live better if we take the policy steps to harness the wonders of science and technology.

How We Can Get There

Government policy should support the acceleration and application of beneficial science and technology. It can do that through a two-pronged strategy: by making investments in science and technology, and by rethinking our regulatory structure to propel innovation instead of slowing it down.

First, we must reinvest in science and technology to provide seed money for the future. I’ve already called for a Discovery Project that would have us commit to spending 2 percent of GDP each year on research and development in science and technology. We should also seed fund a National Green Infrastructure and Investment Bank to catalyze deploy private capital to invest in green infrastructure projects and emerging technologies. The elements of Senator Chris Coons’s Industrial Finance Corporation should be incorporated into this new institution. This will help prioritize loans and equity stakes to publicly-useful science and technology to support them through the “valley of death” between R&D and full commercialization. It will also allow us to deploy our technologies at home and abroad to fight climate change and counter China’s “Belt and Road Initiative.”

We should also utilize the power of government spending to shape market incentives to promote technological advancement. The federal government can issue advance market commitments to kickstart critical breakthroughs like scaled-up carbon capture by guaranteeing a market for commercialized technology. Similarly, because the government is such a large purchaser, it can strategically use its procurement policies to support promising nascent technology, such as carbon-negative concrete and other clean building materials.

Let’s also redouble our commitment to programs proven to work in supporting key innovations. Operation Warp Speed should be made permanent to continue supporting the far-reaching potential of mRNA vaccines – not just for COVID-19 variants, but to expedite the day when we have vaccines to protect against cancers, malaria, and other intractable diseases. We should increase funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has been integral in developing technologies from the Internet to GPS to mRNA vaccines, and spin off new “ARPAs” focused on non-defense science and innovation in other areas of national importance. For mental health research, we should dramatically increase federal funding for the BRAIN Initiative, which is striving to map the brain in the same way we mapped the human genome in order to deepen our knowledge of brain disorders and to develop tools to treat them.

Second, we must pave the way for innovation by rethinking permitting and other regulatory obstacles. Regulations that made sense in isolation or in a past era have accumulated to create logjams of vetocracy that stymy progress. To take one example: The National Environmental Policy Act was a well-intentioned 1960s conservationist law intended to protect nature by placing the burden on federal agencies to demonstrate that permitted infrastructure projects wouldn’t harm the environment. But now, we increasingly need to build new infrastructure to rapidly decarbonize the economy to fight climate change. Today, NEPA is too often used as a cudgel by NIMBYs to tie up offshore wind farms and other clean energy projects with lengthy lawsuits and behemoth environmental impact statements. Environmental reviews can drag on for years and stall important infrastructure projects in the process.

It makes no sense to let green laws slow down green projects. Presidents from both parties – including President Obama – have made efforts to speed up NEPA’s environmental review process. One logical place to start is by simply exempting clean energy projects from NEPA review entirely. Right now, oil and gas are virtually exempt from NEPA – meaning that the current statutory framework of the “environmental” law is perversely stacked against clean energy development and in favor of fossil fuel extraction. We should at minimum secure energy parity by giving clean energy projects like wind, solar, and geothermal equal treatment under NEPA. 

But more fundamentally, we need to reform NEPA to make it harder to block environmental projects and other large-scale efforts to build. When the law was first enacted, environmental impact statements were as short as 10 pages. But in the ensuing decades, litigation risks have ballooned these statements to hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages that take years for agencies to complete. NEPA reform should focus on reining in the scope of these environmental reviews, and limiting those who can sue under the law to just the most directly affected parties. Federal reform could then become a model for reform at the state level of the numerous “little NEPAs” that exist around the country – and Congress could sweeten the pot by creating a “Race to the Top for Building” to incentivize states to undertake smart reforms of their environmental review processes. 

We should also impose a “shot clock” on permitting decisions by government agencies under NEPA and other laws. Environmental reviews and permitting determinations should be completed in 18 months or less so that projects can have reasonably swift certainty about whether they may move forward. To make this feasible, we should centralize permitting into as few federal offices as possible, and staff up those offices with more experts equipped to make smart permitting determinations.

We should also modernize our regulatory state to make it hospitable to new forms of zero-carbon energy sources, like next-generation nuclear reactors. Regulatory decisionmaking on new nuclear facilities should track the same kind of cost-benefit analysis we apply to environmental regulations generally: whether the environmental and energy gains outweigh any potential safety risks. 

We must also reform the Food & Drug Administration to expedite the approval process of new breakthrough medicines. As we’ve learned all too well during the COVID-19 pandemic, FDA delays in approving safe and effective drugs have real and detrimental costs to people’s lives. We can start by following the European model and splitting the FDA up into separate agencies to specialize in food and drug safety, respectively. 

And more generally, we should take a fresh look at the broader regulatory environment to identify rules that are unduly hindering innovation and advancement. Congress should set up a Regulatory Improvement Commission modeled off of the commission used for closing military bases. The RIC would identify regulations that should either be eliminated or modified in order to streamline and promote innovation. The Commission’s mandate should encompass both targeting regulations that hold back innovative projects, and those that impose excessive “time taxes” on individuals trying to access government programs, especially the burdens imposed by tax returns that are not autofilled. Congress would then give an up or down vote on the Commission’s recommendations. 

Why We Must Act

Accelerating scientific and technological innovation can lead to a better quality of life and dynamic future for the United States. But that’s not all. Innovation is essential for our environment: all greenhouse gas reduction strategies run straight through technological advances in clean energy deployment and carbon removal. Innovation can also supercharge American jobs and economic growth, just as it did in the years after World War II when the government’s commitment to R&D was at its peak. 

Charting new frontiers in science and technology is baked into America’s DNA. The world depends on American ingenuity and creativity. Other countries (including China) are aggressively investing in research and development to dominate the technology fields of the future. Decline is a policy choice. We need to keep up. We need to lead the future.  

Technological progress is also a social justice issue. Pivotal breakthroughs and advances in science and technology can have the most meaningful impact on the lives of disadvantaged people and those of limited means. But as high-impact technologies hit the market, the wealthy will be those most able to afford and take advantage of them. Public investment in accelerating the development and cost-efficiency of new technology can make these breakthroughs more accessible faster. Government has a role to play in ensuring equitable access to scientific triumphs.

For too many years, our lack of political imagination has limited the possibilities of our future. For too long, a culture of “No” has frozen in place a stagnant status quo, stifling new ideas and new thinkers. Politicians from both sides of the aisle are now in agreement that America must launch a national industrial policy but unfortunately are relying on the failed playbook of tariffs, regulations, and protectionism while pandering about bringing back yesterday's manufacturing jobs rather than creating the new manufacturing jobs of the future. 

We can’t settle for the same-old any longer. We need to tap into the full galaxy of American imagination, and embrace a culture of “Yes'' to make dreams, ideas, and experiments a reality. When we overcome the short-sighted politics of “Not In My Backyard,” the sky is our limit. To create a more prosperous, livable, and inspiring world for ourselves and our children, we must think big, embrace the possibilities of change, and become once more the dynamic society that America was always meant to be.