Jim Manzi recently praised America’s innovation-heavy approach to climate change. Chait admits that the “embrace of new environmental technology does represent genuine differentiation from the mindless scientific denialism and reflexive sneering at green energy that is the mainstream Republican position.” But he claims that Manzi and other reform conservatives, aka “reformicons,” lack a coherent agenda:
In a 2007 National Review cover story, Manzi proposed to create a new agency tasked with funding advanced, speculative scientific research. “The agency for funding any government-sponsored research should be explicitly modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” he wrote. In 2009, the stimulus created this exact thing. It’s called “The Advanced Research Projects-Energy.” It was explicitly modeled after DARPA. (You can read an account of its creation in “The New New Deal,” a history of the stimulus, which reports on page four that the agency was “modeled after DARPA.”) It still exists.
Now, maybe the reformicons believe ARPA-E needs to have its funding boosted. But they haven’t actually defined a specific proposal to do so. Indeed, it’s not clear they actually realize the agency exists. Since Manzi proposed created a DARPA for energy in 2008, I have only found one example of him mentioning the idea since — a 2011 column calling for a“DARPA analog focused on new energy technologies,” a phrasing that implies Manzi was proposing to create an agency that had already existed for two and a half years. Since its establishment, the Obama administration has been fighting to preserve the agency from House Republicans, who have proposed to cut its budget by 80 percent. Needless to say, the technology-first reformicons have said nothing at all about the incumbent Party stance of slashing basic energy science research.
The Dish 