Each problem that innovation attempts to solve is caused by innovation itself. Breaking that cycle is necessary.

4. Unanswered questions Three unanswered questions can be mentioned here. First, can government ever apply the precautionary principle (Stirling 2017) fast enough to protect against harmful side-effects on e.g. public health? Innovative substances and technologies are increasing artificial and complex, and their integration into society and the environment is often not well understood. Given that innovation is fundamentally uncertain and involves experimentation, there may be gaps in the regulation of moving from scientific discoveries to exploratory applications in the real world (e.g. applying exploratory new medical techniques on real-world patients in unethical ways; see Saemundsson and McKelvey, this issue). Second, if innovation gets us into this mess, can we expect innovation to get us out of it? Innovation may give us the virus, as well as the vaccine (although many may die in between). Or does innovation only lead us into ever increasing difficulties (e.g. road traffic no longer means horse manure on our streets, but exhaust fumes instead). We agree, for example, with the need to give subsidies to renewable energy R&D to reduce the harm from fossil fuels (Acemoglu et al. 2012), but alternatives that are, by almost any definition, improvements upon fossil fuels, are nonetheless bringing new problems: for example, wind turbine blades are piling up in landfills (Martin 2020), and there are problems of solar e-waste (Hansen and Nygaard, this issue). Third, accidents happen. What is the acceptable rate of 'normal accidents' such as Chernobyl? If it is above zero, innovation will be accompanied by catastrophes that are unpredictable and increasingly large (even if the setting-up of preventative procedures could sometimes help to avoid some catastrophes). If it is zero, then this 'risk-averse' stance could put an absolute halt on some types of innovation.