In those cases politicians set the goals. They did not pick how it was to be done. If NASA came back and said "we think we can put humans on the moon with a big catapult" and they were right, we would have built a big catapult. They set the goals and let the real professionals do the work.

What I dislike about this and other proposals is politicians specifically saying what technologies should and should not be used. That's the road to an expensive failure. Instead we should just tax carbon and set emissions goals and let the people who know how to build stuff build stuff.