http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1913781,00.html Clean Energy: U.S. Lags in Research and Development
By Bryan Walsh Saturday, Aug. 01, 2009
When Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon 40 years ago, it was a triumph of American scientific skill. It was also the result of the government's willingness to spend over $125 billion, in today's dollars, to take the country to the moon.
The need to remake our energy economy and to replace fossil fuels with renewables like wind and solar is often referred to as the new Apollo Project, a challenge to our scientists — and to the federal checkbook — that will be even greater than the moon race. We're moving ahead on installing new clean energy — the U.S. was the fastest growing wind power market in the world in 2008 — and Congress, with the support of President Barack Obama, is on the road to establishing caps on carbon dioxide.
But according to many energy experts — including Steven Chu, Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary — the science isn't there yet. Significant basic research and development needs to happen before renewables can truly displace fossil fuels. And unlike the first Apollo Project, the U.S. seems far from ready to spend the money needed to create long-term solutions to global warming — which risks the country falling behind in this new scientific race, toward a clean energy economy. "If we are serious about delivering the real technological change needed to really reduce emissions, we need to scale up research in a massive way," says Mark Muro, a fellow at the Brookings Institute. "We need a paradigm shift, and we're falling behind."
Much of that research would be done under the auspices of the Department of Energy, but Secretary Chu has seen his requests for more funding rebuffed by Congress. Chu wants to spend $280 million to create eight new research and development labs, staffed by scientists from a variety of areas, to work on clean energy solutions. Called "energy innovation hubs," they would be patterned after AT&T Bell Laboratories, the famed research centers where Chu did much of the work that won him a Nobel Prize in physics. Each hub would have a different energy focus, but scientists from different disciplines could meet and interact, and hopefully speed scientific progress. For the Department of Energy, which generally focuses on nuclear weapons, the hubs would represent a chance to start anew with energy research. "This allows you to begin a process of major experimentation with new paradigms," says Muro.
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