Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming - New York Times

As I have said before, for both national security reasons and the preservation of our planet for future generations, we must focus on carbon emissions and its effect on global warming NOW. Current Federal spending for ALL energy-related research and development is only approximately $3 Billion a year (the Bush Administration wants to raise this to $4.2 Billion).To illustrate the point of how the Federal energy research effort today compares to past Federal research efforts, attached is a chart I pulled from another article on relative government research effort sizes. Federally-funded research is important to scientific development becuase it typically most assists the long range basic research that privately-funded corporate research avoids (commerical research is typically more focussed on developing shorter term "end use" technology).

Basically, the attached article from the Times is not a good story, and it points out how critical it is to put in place, right after the elections, vigorous tax incentives and increases in government aid for basic research -- paid for through increased gasoline taxes that offer the by-product of encouraging more responsible behavior. Alternative energy research and conservation cannot simply be driven by the invisible hand of market prices in oil -- the environment cannot wait for several years of $100+ a barrel oil (it is now back below $60 a barrel, and moving south), because we must reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into our environment sooner rather than later. Think of it as a current investment in reducing future environmental catastrophe mitigation costs (think about the costs associated with lots of future Hurricane Katrinas). It is amazing that neither political party has the guts or forsight for our kids to take this issue to the American people and drive this agenda through legislative action.

To sum up this NY Times article, linked below:

"In the United States, annual federal spending for all energy research and development — not just the research aimed at climate-friendly technologies — is less than half what it was a quarter-century ago. It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979, according to several different studies."

“We cannot come close to stabilizing temperatures” unless humans, by the end of the century, stop adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it can absorb, said W. David Montgomery of Charles River Associates, a consulting group, “and that will be an economic impossibility without a major R.& D. investment.”

A sustained push is needed not just to refine, test and deploy known low-carbon technologies, but also to find “energy technologies that don’t have a name yet,” said James A. Edmonds, a chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Energy Department.

At the same time, many energy experts and economists agree on another daunting point: To make any resulting “alternative” energy options the new norm will require attaching a significant cost to the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas.

“A price incentive stirs people to look at a thousand different things,’ ” said Henry D. Jacoby, a climate and energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For now, a carbon cap or tax is opposed by President Bush, most American lawmakers and many industries. And there are scant signs of consensus on a long-term successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty obligating participating industrial countries to cut warming emissions. (The United States has not ratified the pact.)

The next round of talks on Kyoto and an underlying voluntary treaty will take place next month in Nairobi, Kenya.

Environmental campaigners, focused on promptly establishing binding limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases, have tended to play down the need for big investments seeking energy breakthroughs. At the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film on climate change, he concluded: “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.”

While applauding Mr. Gore’s enthusiasm, many energy experts said this stance was counterproductive because there was no way, given global growth in energy demand, that existing technology could avert a doubling or more of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in this century."

Write your Congressmen!!! Focus on improving the efficiency of your energy usage!!! With regard to the latter, I will post an article inthe next day or two giving common sense solutions that each of us can use to reduce energy usage in our homes.

Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming - New York Times