It's December, the time of the year when children ask a bearded man in ostentatious clothing to bring them gifts, which are then purchased for them by friends and family. In the spirit of the season, we at Golden Statements have opted to put out our own Christmas wishlist. Only instead of imploring Jolly Old Saint Nick for our presents, we'll instead be directing our requests toward a different bearded gentleman, Uncle Sam.
The history of government-funded inventions is a long and surprisingly storied one. Government research and grants gave us things like ARPANET, one of the precursor systems to the modern Internet, memory foam, and GPS. More recently government funding as part of Operation Warp Speed helped drastically accelerate the development of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.
What if the government leaned into this and looked at funding more novel inventions? The US government has lots of money. Why not spend it on some cool presents? Here are some things that don't exist, or aren't currently economical to produce, that government money could help bring into the world for the benefit of everyone.
A Direct Air Carbon Capture Technology
In case you haven't noticed, the globe is warming. Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen significantly since the start of the industrial revolution. Something should probably be done about that. In fact, a lot of things can and are being done about that. Transportation and electricity generation are moving away from fossil fuels and towards solar, wind, and other renewable sources. Chemists and biologists are trying to figure out ways to make meat that doesn't require wasting resources on bones, skin, immune systems, and all the other stuff that those animals insist on making before we turn them into a bacon-wrapped turducken.
Sadly, not everything can be effortlessly electrified and made to run on renewables. Cars are easy enough to electrify, but getting fossil fuels completely out of shipping and aviation is a tougher proposition. Our current batteries aren't powerful enough to get a standard container ship or plane across the Pacific and there's probably not much appetite for building charging infrastructure in the middle of the ocean. Plus, the last thing you want to hear when flying in an airplane is that they don't have enough range to make it to the next charging station. Beyond that, some people are going to refuse to eat lab-grown meat for the sorts of stupid culture war reasons that make this seem like a good dinner.
But what if you could just pull carbon dioxide out of the air and put it somewhere else? Well, the challenge is that pulling one gaseous chemical out of the air is rather hard. Not impossible, but hard, and importantly, expensive. There are various approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere, including an interesting approach using limestone being pioneered by Heirloom Carbon in Brisbane, California. These approaches currently cost hundreds of dollars to remove one ton of carbon from the atmosphere, meaning it could cost upwards of 500 trillion dollars to remove all the carbon humans have emitted from the atmosphere. That's an absurdly high number, but even if one were to try to use these methods to offset the 4 billion or so tons of carbon emitted annually using current methods of carbon capture, it would still cost trillions of dollars. But what if instead of costing $500 of electricity to turn a ton of CO2 in the air into a canister of pure CO2 that could be pumped underground, it only costs $50? Now you have a much more reasonable price tag to offset or slowly reverse global carbon emissions. Certainly enough that the US government could foot a portion of the bill.
An anti-opioid addiction drug
Fentanyl addiction has killed a lot of people. More than 70,000 in 2023 alone, according to the CDC. Government efforts to reduce these deaths, at least at the federal level, have primarily focused on reducing the supply of these drugs through agreements to stop the smuggling of precursor chemicals and cracking down on distribution. Good efforts to manage the supply side of the issue, but what about the demand side?
The unfortunate reality is that treating opioid addiction is difficult. In an ideal world, if you were suffering from addiction to fentanyl, you could just get a pill, take it, and, BOOM!, you're not addicted to fentanyl anymore. That's not the world we live in. Currently, the best medication treatment we have basically involves giving people safer opioids, alongside psychological therapy, and slowly weaning them off those medication opioids slowly enough to avoid the onset of withdrawal symptoms. Even then, this approach is not foolproof, with different studies reporting failure rates of 25-50%. Other therapies make use of naltrexone, a chemical that deactivates the chemical pathway that fentanyl uses to cause a "high" but this treatment avenue also has problems with reliability. We're still a long way from a pill that you can take to shut off the chemical action in the brain that causes addiction.
But it looks like there may be hope for something akin to an anti-addiction pill coming from a strange place, diabetes medication. Semaglutide, also known as Ozempic, Rybelsus, or Wegovy, an anti-diabetes drug that works by turning on the chemical pathways that make you feel full, has become a sensation for its weight loss properties. Interestingly, in addition to reducing the desire to eat, Semaglutide has also been observed to reduce other compulsive behaviors like nicotine, alcohol, and gambling addiction. Studies are being undertaken to see if it can be actively used to treat substance abuse disorders.
Even if Semaglutide itself proves to be less effective than desired, it points the way to a true "anti-addiction" drug. The way these drugs work is that they seem to change the body's chemical reward system. This system is normally supposed to reward you for doing things like eating and socializing but can be harmful by creating compulsions to overeat or take drugs. If this system malfunctions similarly for both people with compulsive eating habits and drug addiction disorders, then drugs that help control this system may be worth researching to see if other compounds within this family can help suppress chemical cravings.
Easier to dispose of plastics
This might sound obvious to some, but it's worth saying for emphasis. Plastics are indescribably useful. They're cheap to manufacture, extremely flexible in use, highly durable, and, in some cases, beneficial to the environment. Plastic packaging helps keep perishable foods isolated from the elements during transport, reducing both incidences of foodborne illnesses and food waste from having to throw away tainted food.
But plastics' biggest strength, their durability, is also their biggest weakness. Once plastic packaging has been used for its intended purpose, it's tough to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way. Most plastics can take decades or even centuries to decompose naturally, oftentimes spending that decomposition time in waterways or the ocean. Recycling plastics is a dubious endeavor that oftentimes actually means shipping plastic waste to other countries to dump in their landfills or seas. Arguably the best way to dispose of plastic waste, which is also the most expensive, involves incinerating it at extremely high heat and trying to capture and sequester the toxic combustion byproducts. But even this process may release toxic chemicals into the environment.
Now, part of the solution to this problem will have to involve transitioning away from petroleum-based plastic products as much as possible. The first of the Three Rs are Reduce and Reuse, after all. However, even here, there are tradeoffs. Most of us have probably substituted plastic or paper grocery bags for some form of reusable bag. But depending on what type of bag with which one has elected to replace plastic and what metric one looks at a reusable replacement may need to be used as many as 20,000 times before its use becomes greener than just using a single plastic bag repeatedly.
So what is to be done? Well, although the plastic incineration process is currently expensive and polluting (though it may still be preferable compared to the alternatives), it seems like an avenue for investment and research. Plastic incineration involves taking goods from disparate locations and applying a process to them in a centralized location. So government-funded R&D on how to make that centralized process less polluting may be lower cost with a higher payoff than trying to figure out the exact right type of packaging material for every use case and convincing every commercial user to switch to that material.
Paired with charges on the production of plastics that makers can recoup by properly disposing of their products after use, this has the potential to reduce pollution, landfill use, and oceanic plastic far more than trying to educate Craig at the office that the greasy Chinese takeout box that his lunch came with isn't recyclable, DAMMIT CRAIG WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS LIKE 5 TIMES!