Lack of Funds and Extra Weight Deter GW Progress
October 30th, 2006 by Carbon CoalitionThe New York Times ran an article by Andrew Revkin entitled, “Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming” today. The article reviews national and international efforts that are currently being (and more importantly not being) undertaken on energy research. The challenge of global warming, Revkin reports, is “all the more daunting because research into energy technologies by both government and industry has not been rising, but rather falling.”
The United States, for example, recently announced a new energy plan that will dedicate $3 billion a year for all energy research and development initiatives. On the surface this may seem like a positive step, but in comparison to the 1979 energy budget, approximately $7.7 billion when taking inflation into account, this is a backwards step. In fact, military research alone is allotted over $75 billion annually, nearly 20 times that of energy research in the US.
In response to the lack of action, many scientists and researchers have succumbed to the belief that “the chances of success are so low, unless something breaks the societal impasse, that any technology quest should also include work on increasing the resilience to cilamte extremes–through actions like developing more drought-tolerant crops.” A report commissioned by the British government announced the risk that global warming could turn “200 million people into refugees.”
While action and funding, especially at the political level, remains passive and voluntary, “many experts, from oil-industry officials to ecologists, agree that the status quo for energy research will not suffice.”
A recent study by Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois and his doctoral student Laura McLay, tells Americans, once again, that “losing weight” could help combat global warming. This time, however, it’s not the “carbon diet” play-on-words, it’s literal. This article in the New York Times reports on the paper that was published in The Engineering Economist. The study concludes that due to American’s growing bellies an estimated one billion gallons of gasoline is burned every year to transport the extra weight.
