Success Quote by Maurice Strong

The line reads like a throwaway aside, but it smuggles in a whole worldview about how technological change actually happens: not through pure market virtue, but through strategic sheltering. Maurice Strong isn’t pitching a starry-eyed green utopia here; he’s naming the awkward, unglamorous bridge between invention and adoption. “Already have” is the quiet flex - progress is framed as present-tense and operational, not hypothetical. “On the road in Japan” isn’t incidental geography, either. Japan signals a policy-and-industry ecosystem where coordinated planning, patient capital, and social permission for experimentation have often beaten the West’s wait-for-profit reflex.

The key phrase is “subsidized from within the corporation.” Strong is pointing to internal cross-subsidies as a private-sector analog to public climate policy: a company taxing its own successful products to incubate a costly, politically desirable future. It’s also a defensive rhetorical move. By specifying that the subsidy is internal, he preempts the standard backlash against government handouts while still defending the principle that emerging clean tech won’t survive a near-term cost test.

“Still at a high cost” does more than admit a drawback; it frames expense as a temporary developmental stage rather than a fatal flaw. The subtext is that waiting for perfect economics is just another way to delay decarbonization. Strong’s intent is pragmatic persuasion: normalize the idea that the early green transition will be underwritten - deliberately, unevenly, and ahead of mass-market demand.