His "case in point" using energy technologies actually demonstrates that his assumption that government bureaucrats and policy makers are wise enough to direct "innovation" and technology change is probably false.
Five decades ago we were building CO2 emission free nuclear power plants at a rapid rate and the economics and safety were looking better and better. When including the big accidents that have occurred with this technology, the world was getting far more CO2 free electrical energy per life lost, life injured, land area impacted, and resources utilized than any of the alternatives. Relative to the risks of other energy sources this was the best option, but our "wise" policy makers decided to regulate the industry to death by preventing most innovation making the technology static. I was working in this area five decades ago and developed a minor innovation that would save about 10 million per reactor and my boss told me "great idea, but it will cost more to get it approved through the regulatory system than the savings" so I shifted to other areas. Innovation in this area of CO2 free energy was killed by government bureaucrats, non-hard science academics, activists, and policy makers.
The biggest innovation in energy in the last 4 decades that has completely upset the the CO2 production per unit of energy, economics, international power relationships, and international politics has been the fracking revolution producing both gas and oil while destroying the market for coal and the power of OPEC. This dramatically decreases the CO2 emitted per unit of energy to great benefit to the world. Before fracking, the rise of the Middle East and Islam as major factors in the world driven by oil, which was becoming the dominate energy source and source of instability with huge and unstable price spikes. However, with fracking natural gas became a cheap, reliable and dispatchable energy source that is well distributed around the world.
This entire shale fracking revolution was unsupported by the government agencies who like the EPA spent freely trying to find something wrong with fracking. Per unit of energy, gas is far superior to coal and oil and depending upon how you weight factors like ability to match supply and demand, energy storage requirement, and environmental area impacts in a life cycle analysis (LCA) it can be superior to solar and wind that require massive overcapacity and expensive, resource intensive energy storage to actually be a real competitive source at scale. His statement of solar and wind out-competing only works when they are a minority of the market (ie not solving the CO2 problem) only when the sun shines.
Due to the fact that mineral rights can be private property in the US, small companies could developing fracking technology producing gas that has decreased our country wide CO2 emissions more that all the solar and wind combined.