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White House Seeks 72 Percent Cut To Clean Energy Research (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Trump administration has made it very clear that it is pro fossil fuels and has little interest in pushing programs the promote renewable energy. Now, the Washington Post reports that the president's proposed 2019 budget slashes funds for Energy Department programs focused on energy efficiency. While the proposal is just a jumping off point, the fact that it seeks to cut such funding by 72 percent underscores where the administration's interests lie and in which direction its policies will continue to go. The draft budget documents viewed by Washington Post staff showed that the president is looking to cut the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) budget to $575.5 million, down from the current $2.04 billion level. Included in the budget cuts are funds for programs researching fuel efficient vehicles, bioenergy technologies, solar energy technology and electric car technologies. Additionally, the draft budget proposal seeks to cut jobs, dropping staff levels from 680 down to 450. One EERE employee told the Washington Post, "It shows that we've made no inroads in terms of convincing the administration of our value, and if anything, our value based on these numbers has dropped." The report notes that the Energy Department had requested less extreme spending cuts, but the Office of Management and Budget pushed for the more substantial ones found in the draft proposal. It's also worth noting that the proposal could still be changed before being released in February.
That's true. The government's role should be to make the market work efficiently, which means eliminating market failures such as monopolies and negative externalities.
But the federal government doesn't seem to be eager to internalize negative externalities by charging polluters the cost of air pollution, about $1,000 per person annually. Instead, the current administration has been doing the opposite by dismantling protections!
While it lasted, the government's investments in clean energy research were a good way to repay its negligence in making sure the market cleaned up after itself. Ending the research will only accelerate the environmental debt that our children and grandchildren will inherit from us.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Sorry for your brain injury. I hope losing the ACA doesn't mean you can't still get treatment.
Maybe this is news to you, but a good 50% or more of education is controlled at the local level, through the local school board. That's made up of people voted in by the members in the community. Unless you're telling us that everyone in every state is voting in liberals for their local school board, your shrieking about the left is pretty stupid.
Another 25% or so of education is controlled by the state education agency, generally headed by a board and/or a state superintendent who's appointed by the governor of the state. Last I looked, all of the state governors weren't liberals, so it stands to reason that most of the state education agencies are not liberal.
Probably the last 25% is controlled by federal law, which, and this may surprise you, tends to be written by both republicans and democrats. The last major bill was ESSA, which was sponsored by Lamar Alexander and passed on a bipartisan vote.
Where do you get the idea that education is somehow owned by the left? Because the left is smart and the right is dumb?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Almost all of the incremental improvements I've seen with solar panel technology have come from private industry doing their own in-house R&D so their specific brand of panel can outperform the competition in some way. It wasn't a matter of the U.S. government doing all that R&D and then sharing it with industries so we could have better panels for all.
Actually, there are a lot of universities in the USA doing research on solar panels, and then publishing the research (sharing it with industry). Private companies do research too, but it doesn't make sense to ignore the university research which is quite extensive.
Examples of government funded research that made it to private sector:
Cell phones
Radio
Internet
Electron Guns (tube TV's)
LCD displays
Lithium batteries
Just from NASA alone:
Barcodes
Cordless power tools
MRI Machines
Microchips & Integrated Circuits
Quartz clocks
Smoke Detectors
Teflon
Velcro
Infrared thermometers
Ventricular Assist devices (Devices that make heart transplants possible)
Artificial limbs
LEDs
Scratch resistant glass
Aircraft anti icing systems (IE what makes planes able to fly in winter and as high as they do)
Radial tires with a life over 2000 miles
Chemical leak detection systems
Fire breaks & Fire resistant building materials
pressurized Fire extinguishers
Memory foam
Cordless vacuums
Freeze dried foods
Digital cameras
I'm tired of typing, and I'm not even 3% through the list.