I maintain that we could get this done -- meaning largely off oil and into clean energy -- within a decade if we built the proper incentives into the tax code and regulated what (say) automakers are allowed to build through the CAFE standards: Massive cuts for green energy consumers and businesses, steep Pigouvian taxation for polluters, and so on.  Surely this isn't more difficult than the science of putting a man on the moon, and we managed to get that done within a decade.

The Moon-landing project was easy, or at least much different. All it took was siphoning off a fraction of the U.S. federal budget and spending it on a bunch of engineering work -- scaling up rockets, building hardware that had already been half-designed, and so on. The hard part was getting all the parts put together and working, which required a lot of smart people, management competence, and visionary enthusiasm (now, why is space so stagnant today...? Oh, right).

This is fundamentally different from wrestling with the politics of auto manufacture and tax policy. If you want a success that parallels the Moon-landing, you need to look for an engineering project that would make an immense difference.

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