[Theophylact]

Nobody ever does anything until there's an emergency. Then they throw money at it until they solve the immediate problem; but that's hardly efficient. We could have saved trillions of dollars and billions of tons of CO2 if we had started developing alternate sources of renewable energy in the 70s. But practically the first thing Reagan did when he got in was to kill the funding for SERI (now NREL).

Now, of course, everything will be much costlier, and years have been lost.