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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

priorities are pretty clear. we spent <$20B on the covid vaccine, operation warp speed. ukraine received $75B in the last year from the u. s. if it was the same price, we could have solved 4 highly infectious diseases in just the last year. i’m not trying to get political on that specific war; just military in general is where the money goes

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Imagine if, after the first oil crisis, the US had earmarked 10% of the military’s middle east budget to R&D for energy independence.

We would have solved the global warming problem by the mid 1990’s.

A sufficient number of nuclear power plants would have cost a lot less than that.

You can't (well, couldn't) make steel or concrete from electricity from a nuclear power plant. And up until recently you couldn't really drive a car from the electricity from a nuclear power plant. You can't plow or plant a field, or pave a road, or so many other things.

I think if you look at a breakdown in sources of CO2 emissions, it's less than half. Yes, that's a lot, but it's not the whole story.

I'm 100% for getting off fossil fuels. I drive electric. But the transition is a hell of a lot more complex than "build a lot of nuclear power plants."

I didn't expect it to complete replace all fossil fuel -- just almost all the coal + a large share of the oil. Cars would still have used petrol. Heating could have become largely electric. If they really wanted, they could have used synthetic petrol -- but that is rather inefficient.

The US produced (and produces) lots of oil. It would probably have been enough (or close enough) to make the US entirely independent of OPEC oil.

The two proposed solutions were: military (the road taken), very expensive research (not really taken). I added a third one (nuclear) because it was cheaper and it wouldn't have needed much research. It was a known solution that would have gotten the US most (likely all) of the way towards energy independence and it would have reduced CO2 emissions a lot.

Note that those $20B were not for research but for production and rollout. The research costs (for BioNTech) were in the order of only $1B or two. Source (in German): https://archive.is/L5oFm

Though, obviously, no research lives in a vacuum. Companies profit from universities and the larger educational system, from other researchers laying the groundwork over the years etc.

Well, the US spends far more on elder care than on the military, so you should say that that is where the money goes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_S...

And we had multiple covid vaccines within under a year, with holdups being studying effects and approvals. While I agree we overspend on military, I don't think there's evidence spending more money would have improved the covid vaccine situation.

Then the opposite would be true? Less money we would have got the same outcome. Slightly nonsensical.

We need time and more people looking at the issue = money.

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