No, what we don't like is having people telling other people what to do with the point of a gun. Energy and food production improvements didn't occur because the government mandated it.
Actually, those changes did happen, in part, because of the government.
The government does thinks like mandating fuel standards for vehicles, or pollution standards for factories, which has had large effects on the energy crises mentioned above. Or, the government made large amounts of federal research dollars available scientists (often at public facilities) to research genetics for certain types of crops to address food shortages, which addressed famine issues. That was a major way in which governments addressed another major crises discussed above.
Private forces certainly played a large role in those things as well, but government spending and mandates were a big factor as well.
You can choose to complain about being forced to do things all you want, but read up on the principles of the founding fathers. They pretty much all said that once something starts to affect society as a whole, its time for the government to step in. If climate change affects us all, the government has to get involved.
We do? How? Please explain to me (the guy with the solar powered house and car) how we have this capability.
I used to have some DOE links, but I'm too lazy to find them right now, so I'll just summarize part of a discussion I was having with a fairly high up guy in this field the other day.
Essentially, renewable energy sources are to the point where they can produce energy at a cost that is almost as low as non renewable sources right now (exact details depend on the details of the market). But, the major problem is the renewable sources are a lot less consistent in what they produce - the amount of energy that they produce varies a lot more. Now, you can average the randomness out by distributing your power over the entire country. Places that are overproducing distribute the excess to places that are underproducing etc.
BUT, you need a reasonable power grid to distribute that much power. Our current power grid is terrible and outdated and could never handle things. But, the government is unwilling to invest in updating infrastructure, so renewable energy sources are a nonstarter since they won't be consistent enough.
But yeah, if you look at the cost per kilowatthour of large scale, state of the art renewable energy sources, its really pretty comparable to fossil fuels.
Well that's the thing. Government's "doing their part" sounds a lot like governments trying to find a new way to make money to redistribute.
You're paranoid. The government doing their part is stuff like "maintaining a reasonable national infrastructure" and "keeping reasonable pollution standards". This is stuff that is all easily within the expected role of the government.
Why? The food and energy abudnance we have today has nothing whatsoever to do with the government.
Except for the huge research dollars that the government put in to develop a lot of the technology to grow better crops. Granted, the private sector has largely taken over nowadays, but the government plays a huge role in the early days of those research projects. The early days of a lot of the big energy stuff was pretty government heavy too.
The Soviet Union had a truly top-down approach. How are they doing these days?
Yeah, and anarchist collectives don't get much done either. I'm not saying we should do a purely top-down or bottom-up approach. I'm saying we should do both. Which makes sense since that approach has repeatedly worked in the past. Like in the crises that were mentioned above.