Lack of funding for renewable energy research exposes Bush priorities
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Posted on January 25, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
So we blogged yesterday about the failure of Bush’s State of the Union speech to address global warming, resulting climate change, and our economic dependence on Earth-destroying fossil fuels with anything truly meaningful.
The facts speak for themselves, and I found a bushel load of facts in this morning’s NY Times Business section. It is a long article about the lack of funding for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. This is our national laboratory, an agency of the US Department of Energy.
Here’s the revealing hypocrisy. When Bush first mentioned the need to develop new energy sources in his State of the Union a year ago, folks at this funds-strapped lab thought times were looking up. Top on their list is research on wind, solar, biomass — well, if you go to their website, you see the list on their home page. Instead:
the money flowing into the nation’s primary laboratory for developing renewable fuels is actually less than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration.
And that, my friends, reveals the real agenda of this administration — and it is not for a fossil-fuel-free future anytime soon.
I know I should not put quotes from linked articles on a blog, but since it is a long one and you may not have time to read it all, let me just copy my favorite part:
…even additional money for renewable energy will be going up against government tax policies that encourage more energy consumption. Companies can still deduct purchases of sport utility vehicles and utility bills, for example, while consumers get a break to build bigger homes with deductions for interest payments on mortgages, even on second homes, that far outweith their energy savings credits.
Meanwhile, fuel efficiency standards for automobiles have changed only slightly over the decades, and the federal government still does not have a building code to encourage energy efficiency.
It is a policy mix that goes back many administrations and appears difficult to shake, partly because dirty sources of energy like coal and [oil]shale are what the United States has in abundance.
And the folks that control development of those abundant dirty energy sources are the oil and gas corporations for whom this administration, front-loaded with people from that industry (like Bush, Cheney, and Rice), is pretty much at their service.
So here is a taxpayer funded research agency that lacks equipment and the research funds to help this country get off fossil fuels. With all this attention on foreign oil, we are still not able to have the conversation about the other Earth-destroying fuels that drive our economy of consumption, and which have even worse implications for global warming and destruction of ecosystems — coal being absolutely number one on the list.
This isn’t just about fuel efficiency standards for our cars, this is also about what turns on our lights and heats and cools our homes — in way too many cases, our multiple homes. This is about how fossil fuels, which are destroying our atmosphere and driving a level of human consumption that might drive us to extinction, are fueling the engine of a totally unsustainable way of life.
With all this futuristic talk about alternatives and renewables, a lot of that technology already exists and the government, yes, through many administrations, has been morally lax in forcing the economic changes that would have had millions of us already living off the power from wind turbines and solar-based technologies, for example. Also on the agenda should be a quick turn away from corn-based ethanol towards other biomass and agricultural and human waste products as sources of energy.
Click on the graph that accompanies this article and you can see the problem. We need to shift these trends — and quickly.
All this shows how policy drives economic choices. Policies can change and force other choices.
And then there is us. We have got to stop this nonsense about multiple homes, gas-guzzling vehicles, travel anywhere we want whenever we want, choices that drive exurban sprawl, destroy local farming, drive a global economy fueled by oil, gas, and coal. Remember that these industries are doing all this destruction to support, and make enormous profits off of, our lifestyle choices.
One last thought on this. It is estimated that the Iraq war will cost in excess of one trillion dollars before it is over (more than $361 billion plus thus far, and counting). This administration also wants to increase the Armed Forces and sharply increase the defense budget, which already totals more than half a trillion dollars annually if the war is factored in (cleverly, the administration has refused to put the war budget figures into the overall federal budget).
Now just imagine what this money could do to help us through the transition from fossil fuels to a new economics of living in balance with this Earth’s living systems.
The NY Times editorial writers got it right this morning. You can read it here.
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2 Responses to “Lack of funding for renewable energy research exposes Bush priorities”
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Federal funding for science and technology is abyssmal in recent years. The entire yearly budget of NASA could be funded for less than 5% of the Iraq war to date. Bush isn’t driving new research forward — he’s driving it into the ground.
These summaries and analysis are clear and helpful. I appreciate as well the spirit of building the positive, what heals, what is gaining momentum. It is quite clear to me that we are experiencing signs of the collapse of the American Empire with its unhealthy control and exclusivity that benefit some and ignore the masses. I think that this is true within and outside USA. I also see that leaders for the real common good are rising up within USA and around the world. The Berlin Wall fell as did apartheid. So will American domination . . . for the health and well being of Americans too. No one wants to see people suffer here or elsewhere. But I and millions more are willing to do that as needed to heal Earth and all peoples. The rise of the solidarity movements and the non-violent, active resistance to injustice movements in the last century indicate for me that God is doing great new deeds within and around us.