Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2011, 8 1014 would need to be found to reduce the costs substantially. Galiana and Green [57] as well as Lomborg [58], based on their work, suggest that the way to do this is to impose a low level carbon tax to generate revenue for technological research to bring down the costs of reducing CO2 emissions. Their arguments have some merit, but there is considerable doubt whether throwing even more research money at the climate change problem (even before Obama, the US Government was spending about $5 billion per year on climate-related research [59] will produce the technological progress needed to substantially reduce the costs? Or would more money simply build an even larger and better funded research community to lobby for even more funds? The answer is that research is inherently unpredictable and there is no assurance that even greater amounts will ―solve‖ broadly focused problems such as cancer, or in this case, energy efficiency. Research and development designed to exploit a promising new technological opportunity is a very different thing than attempting technological improvements over a broad but well researched set of possibilities, none of which offer immediate reason to believe a breakthrough is imminent. The US Government had great success with a narrowly focused Manhattan Project during World War II but in that case there was a narrowly focused goal which attempted to exploit a new technological approach, Such is not the case here, where any number of technologies would need to be explored with none holding out great current promise of major cost reductions. As an example, it now appears that an important advance has been made by combining horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology to obtain both oil and natural gas from shale formations. This may promise the US and a number of other countries with suitable such formations the possibility of energy independence from the Middle East, but this breakthrough was not achieved by a large government-run research effort but rather by private initiative over many years. Technological progress requires not just more government research expenditures, but also luck and a willingness to follow valid scientific principles that are needed to carry out good science. The much lower energy costs promised by this particular technological breakthrough also raises the bar for developing new reduced CO2 emitting technologies that much higher since the increased production of natural gas and oil using these technologies promise lower fuel costs which any lower carbon emitting alternative would have to meet to be competitive and therefore viable without government subsidies—presumably the goal of Lomborg [58] and Galiana and Green‘s [57] proposed research. 3.3. Geoengineering as an Alternative to Reducing GHG Emissions Needs to Be Considered Fortunately, as Lomborg [58] has recognized, there is an alternative to what appears to be a rather futile effort to reduce carbon emissions [55]. This alternative is geoengineering. This promises global temperature decreases (or increases if needed) at a tiny fraction of the cost of carbon emissions reductions with much greater certainty [55,60]. One of the major assumptions made by those advocating climate change mitigation has been that the way to do it is by reducing human-caused emissions of GHGs. Perhaps because CAGW supporters allege that it is increasing GHG levels, particularly CO2, that is causing and will cause the increase in temperatures, this assumption has apparently been plausible enough to many people that little effort has been made by most environmental economists (or physical scientists, for that matter) to determine whether such reductions