Richard Lee Crawford, 74, of Virginia Beach, passed away on March 14, 2015. Altmeyer Funeral Home is handling arrangements.
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Chuck Wray
7 years ago
I would see him and his friend Keith, at McDonalds on Holland Road in Virginia Beach. He was always there in the morning.
I enjoyed talking with him.
Phan
7 years ago
Roger, this was a really tefrriic talk. You dealt with the subject in a rational, objective and dispassionate way. And your conclusions are very powerful.I’m a catastrophe skeptic (more precisely, I believe the best evidence supports a equilibrium climate sensitivity of between 1 and 2K) however, I very much believe that we need to find cheap, clean and abundant alternatives to fossil fuels.One area where I disagree with you is in the wisdom of using governments to orchestrate direct economic transfers as a way of funding green tech research (through carbon taxes or other means). Governments are, at best, inefficient investors. As a academic, I imagine you will take umbrage to the following comment — but very few commercially successful technologies have come from government research. Government research is good at projects where cost is no concern and commercial success is not a factor: moon landing, the atom bomb, etc. But you would be hard pressed to find an example where government research produced a product that was economically cheaper at scale than what the private sector could acomplish. (the Internet started as a government research project and produced a basic light-weigh network protocol, but it was private innovators who build the software and network hardware necessary to make the internet scale cost efficiently). And frankly I worry that the politicians would simply use the money to buy votes (Ethanol subsidies) or to pay back big campaign donors (Solyndra).Why not leave the money in the private economy and have the government create investment incentives around clean tech? This would be vastly more efficient and much more probable to produce the desired outcome. For example, if you were to eliminate capital gains tax for qualified green tech investments or provide an up-front investment tax credit, vast sums of private money would flow into those investments.
I would see him and his friend Keith, at McDonalds on Holland Road in Virginia Beach. He was always there in the morning.
I enjoyed talking with him.
Roger, this was a really tefrriic talk. You dealt with the subject in a rational, objective and dispassionate way. And your conclusions are very powerful.I’m a catastrophe skeptic (more precisely, I believe the best evidence supports a equilibrium climate sensitivity of between 1 and 2K) however, I very much believe that we need to find cheap, clean and abundant alternatives to fossil fuels.One area where I disagree with you is in the wisdom of using governments to orchestrate direct economic transfers as a way of funding green tech research (through carbon taxes or other means). Governments are, at best, inefficient investors. As a academic, I imagine you will take umbrage to the following comment — but very few commercially successful technologies have come from government research. Government research is good at projects where cost is no concern and commercial success is not a factor: moon landing, the atom bomb, etc. But you would be hard pressed to find an example where government research produced a product that was economically cheaper at scale than what the private sector could acomplish. (the Internet started as a government research project and produced a basic light-weigh network protocol, but it was private innovators who build the software and network hardware necessary to make the internet scale cost efficiently). And frankly I worry that the politicians would simply use the money to buy votes (Ethanol subsidies) or to pay back big campaign donors (Solyndra).Why not leave the money in the private economy and have the government create investment incentives around clean tech? This would be vastly more efficient and much more probable to produce the desired outcome. For example, if you were to eliminate capital gains tax for qualified green tech investments or provide an up-front investment tax credit, vast sums of private money would flow into those investments.