Both graphs are from Pacific Northwest National Lab analyst James Dooley’s excellent report, “US Federal Investments in Energy R&D.” It’s these ridiculously low levels of research spending that make me wary of writing off any particular technology. Say carbon capture and sequestration or enhanced geothermal or wave power. The truth is that we haven’t put in the resources to know which technologies are a good idea.
Perhaps, given the top graph, we need a new measure of investment. Perhaps stealth bombers? They cost $831 million a piece in 2005 dollars ($530 million back in 1989).
If you’re doing the math at home — which I wasn’t doing very well, as Jason pointed out below — the cumulative budget for the DOE’s energy R&D program from 1961-2008 was about 215 stealth bombers. The annual energy R&D budget rarely exceeded $3 billion (in 2005 dollars), or not even enough change to build four bombers.
When power is concentrated in a large, wealthy nation, a handful of people get to make decisions on a scale that is truly astonishing. I am reminded of Jared Diamond’s section on ancient China, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is thought, by Diamond, that advanced marine technology would have easily allowed China to make its way across the Pacific. And yet, centralized power made the decision to not pursue it–thus affecting the future of China and probably world history. Imagine the USA that would exist today had we not spent all this money on defense, post WW2. We probably still would have enjoyed the benefits of the USDollar regime, and no doubt we would have still produced a ton of GDP. Tragic. We wasted not only our own capital, but, in many respects the world’s capital.
There seems to me to be two errors on our part, and I don’t think lack of funding is the major one.
For instance, is much funding really required to put light rail in every medium-sized and larger city? How about expanding the national rail system for greater capacity and to run on electricity? The technology in both cases is already well developed and in use all over the world.
Avoiding the infrastructure disaster coming our way by spending money upgrading our dams, levees, water systems, sewer systems and bridges also needs no extra research $’s.
Did we need more research money to create a national health system that spends half of what we do now and gets better results (and covers everyone)?
Does the U.S. really need to spend almost more than every other nation in the world combined in national defense?
The technologists will always say that “more basic research is needed” but I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I think that it has served as a distraction and allowed some interested parties to say that nothing could be done without some or other technology breakthrough.
Not true. The U.S. has been managed extremely poorly over the last few decades. No extra technology needed.
Andre Angelantoni
http://www.postpeakliving.com
The Cold War was like Mad Country disease for anyone unlucky enough to have eaten the tainted meat.
I think the research budget chart is in millions, not thousands, so a single stealth bomber is less than 4.5 times the r&d budget…check the math?
I’m not going to argue with you that the U.S. has been managed poorly. It’s pretty obvious now. And I’m completely with you on the technological fig leaf argument that many powerful parties use to delay change. I think that it’s also obvious that we could have entirely different transportation and energy systems with just existing technology. Those systems would most likely have positioned us better for a carbon- and energy-constrained world.
I submit, though, that if we had been doing more R&D, there’d be more scientifically-vetted arguments for efficiency, alternative power, transportation improvements, etc. Maybe not. Maybe most of the R&D would have found that doing the same old-same old was the best idea, but I think that most of the thinkers at places like SERI, Oak Ridge, and MIT wanted to change the status quo, even if sometimes they wanted to push it strange and possibly unproductive ways.
Also, the dollars you see listed here are RD&D really. And government help in commercially demonstrating (or deploying) new energy technologies has been damn near necessary in the 20th century. Less money there means less new technologies get commercialized. So, it’s not just lack of funds for basic research, but lack of funds for infrastructure and operational capacity building that you see reflected in these numbers.
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