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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.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
This administration is determined to make the USA more like a third world country.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This is probably not a big deal, IMHO. Sure, some groups will be stymied by the lost of tax breaks and grants. But let's face it; solar and wind are going to become cheaper than fossil fuels in the long term anyway (hell, it's a dead heat right this minute) and we won't need government funding for renewables to propagate. In fact, I would rather the feds just get out of the way.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
We need to stop giving corporations money for investing in future profitable endeavors.
When companies invest in solar or wind technology, maybe it will be profitable, or maybe not. But either way, much of the benefit goes to the public in the form of avoided externalities. Without public funding, companies will still research alternative energy, but will do much less than is optimal from the public's perspective.
Subsidies for alternative energy research make way more sense than subsidies for alternative energy production. We should do more of the former, and less of the latter.
You do realize that a lot of basic research is done at these national labs, that often times, will not occur in private industry because the investment is too high and returns aren't quick enough. Businesses will seek profit for their shareholders, not what's good for humanity.
Businesses often depend on this basic research to be released to public to make products and services from but someone has to do the research. This cut also hits solar energy (which is currently only one of the few realistic long term energy sources we're aware of as a species), battery research (which is critical for many future developments--hell you can even pour your "clean" coal energy into batteries, they're agnostic...), and more.
What Trump and the GOP are calling "Make America Great Again" is just a re-branding of "Bring Back the Good-Old Days". They want to turn back the calendar to some decade before the 1960's, in every way that matters, and this is just a small part of that agenda. Take a look at how America was, socio-politically, in the 1950's and before, and you'll get an idea of the hell-hole they want to drag us back to.. but I diverge. This is one of the most retarded things Trump has done. Of course it probably won't have any effect on industry, since the energy industry as a whole has some actually intelligent people working for it who see that fossil fuels' days are numbered and that other sources are going to be necessary if we want to continue having a civilization; the only real effect this will have is to further prove that Trump and his cronies aren't living in the Real World and are not fit to lead. We won't be 'making America great again' by being left behind by the rest of the industrialized world; we sure as fuck won't be impressing anyone when the likes of China passes us up because our so-called 'leadership' has it's collective head up it's collective ass like this.
Come on.. This is a leaked document which is admitted to be a draft, subject to wholesale changes, of a budget request from the DOE, which will be edited at the Whitehouse before the president presents it to Congress with a bunch of other similar documents. Congress will ignore the president's input and draft their own budget in the house, argue for months over in committee, sent to the floor of the house, finally arrive at something that won't be recognizable as the original draft that the house passes as a "budget" which will be taken up by the Senate who will likely add their own amendments in committee and from the floor which if it actually passes, will head back to the reconciliation committee to be possibly edited again before both chambers vote to pass it or not.
How's this even news fit to print by a respected news paper much less "News for nerds" on Slash Dot? There is a nearly zero chance these numbers will survive all the coming edits driven by the endless debate in congress.
How do you think it gets changed?
It's public outrage that causes items like this to get scrapped. Extreme cuts like this are designed to change the Overton window so they can "compromise" on slightly less extreme cuts later on. The earlier the uproar the less chance they have to shift the debate.
I stole this Sig
And military strength flows from a strong economy, strong education, leading research, etc. Good luck having a strong military for long without the rest.
If you think Musk's engineers don't rely on publications performed under government funding (around the world) to advance, then you're crazy. Advances are certainly made by private industry, but a lot of pieces come from public funded research.
It's like saying Musk's Tesla group haven't benefited from any research and development into SLAM methodologies, which built off of much research in computer vision to help build their autopilot feature and self driving vehicles. Take away all public funded research in computer vision, for example, and lane assisted driving wouldn't be remotely near where it is today. It might eventually be developed as a competitive requirement as industry inched into this territory.
I'm no material scientist but I suspect much of the battery technology used can be traced back to leaps developed under or as a result of public funded research.
Research is costly and high risk of failure so businesses typically minimize research to the point of keeping a competitive advantage. Not only that, if you rely strictly on private industry to do all the research, you end up in situations like we have now in the US with the pharmaceutical industry (which is even higher risk of failure and overhead investment).
Actually, economics, esp. manufacturing, is what enables a strong military.
WHen you do NOT have that, then any strong military is simply a drain on society. And right now, our mlitary is draining our GDP because of the idiots in CONgress.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is amazing how the far right really does not understand how important all of those items are. Even now, the military is pointing out how worthless our high school grads are. They are in HORRIBLE shape, and many of them can not pass boot camp or even pass high school.
Oddly, the GOP screams about having a strong defense, while gutting EVERYTHING needed to make it so.
The GOP is SOOOO fucking over America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Military spending is twice what it should be as a percentage of GDP - look at 1940 just before the war. Then shit got real and we spent 40% of GDP for WW2. Imagine what would happen if the US spent $7.89 trillion on war. That'd be a freakin' space opera.
A true "Bring Back the Good-Old Days" policy would cut DoD spending to $291.35B instead of increasing it to $639.1B - a $347B difference or 53% of the deficit. $650B in cost cutting or revenue increases needs to happen to stop the debt from growing. If each tax bracket was increased by 5%, the gap would be closed and the budget would be balanced. To actually pay the debt off, you'd need to raise 6.1 times current annual revenue in excess of spending. It can be done, but needs to be done as a 50 year plan to not wreck the economy. Politicians are incapable of long-term planning.
I'd like to see some examples of successful publicly funded research projects.
The irony of someone typing that on a computer, communicating over the world wide web on the internet is obviously completely lost.
Not to mention the fact that some of those internet hops may very well occur via satellites.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's not *your* money, any more than the road you use is your road. It's our money. Your ability to earn money is inexorably linked to us pooling some percentage of it together for the common good, of which scientific progress is a part.
"Old man yells at systemd"
> The federal government has no business doing commercial product R&D that's actually being done in the private sector.
This is so wrong it's hard to know where to start. Let's just confine ourselves to renewable energy. It's fair to say that renewable is a growth market worldwide. If your country doesn't do fundamental research on renewables, how do you expect to capture this market? Well, it wont by slapping a 30% tariff on importing PV panels because the world's largest *market* for PV will retaliate in kind and you'll sell precisely 0.
Bottom line, if you're not in this race, you lose market share, and that means losing exports, jobs, tax revenue and all that jazz.
The second aspect of your rant is the whole small-government idea. Well, most of world considers that one of the things a government ought to do is ensure there is a healthy safe environment for their citizens. Any move to renewables is basically a strategy for avoiding chuffing out fine particles from chimney stacks and tail pipes. I mean, you wouldn't want to have everyone spewing out catalytic-free diesel clouds from their cars would you? Eventually, everyone is going to be driving (or being driven by) electric vehicles. That's just the way it's going to be. Most nations realise the value of investing in research so they can reap economic benefits from participating in the emergent industry.
Or you can basically kill all your environment protections, kill your research funding and initiate a trade war with everyone else by slapping on tariffs. It's a policy so perfectly honed to be almost completely the wrong-thing-to-do that it's breathtaking. Still, I'm sure your ideologues will convince you that it's good some how, the market will sort it all out right? Good luck with that.
The federal government has every business doing commercial product R&D that won't pay off in the short term, but that may very well reap huge benefits in the long term. When the average tenure of an S&P 500 CEO is only 10 years (https://www.creditdonkey.com/ceo-statistics.html), they have no interest in investing in technologies that may only pay off in 20, 30 or 50 years.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of investment humanity needs right now....long term, speculative innovation.
Or we could just stick our head in the sands, say that black is white, coal is clean, news is fake and we've always been at war with eastasia. Maybe that will work out for us.
Remember when we used to be a first world country in the US, and poured resources into science and engineering and education so that we wouldn't fall behind the Commies? Today it seems like our competition is Syria, and as long as we're doing better than Syria that we don't need to work harder to be better.
This is like Biff from Back To The Future is president, and he gives noogies to any nerdy scientist he runs across.
The fact that someone gave money to Clinton instead of Trump says very little about politics. Clinton was the lesser of two evils, whereas Trump was dedicated to the destruction of most federal departments (witness the slash and burn leaders he appointed to the departments).
Most people vote based on their wallets, and teachers voting for Trump meant voting for losing their jobs.
Teaching creationism should not be considered left or right, it should be considered stupid. The only reason it's considered right wing is because many of those hard core fundamentalists allied themselves with fiscal conservatives and segregationists. We used to have a much more equal distribution of religious believers across the parties until the Moral Majority insisted that you couldn't be a good Christian unless you voted the way they told you to.
Public funding of research is a terrible idea. The decisions on who gets the money is decided by a bunch of lawyers in Congress based on how many votes it will buy them in their re-election campaign, not on it's ability to reduce pollution.
Whilst the size of the pot may be decided by Congress, a lot of the research goes on in universities, and allocation is via competitive tender, judged by a panel of senior academic peers.
Where do you get the idea that education is somehow owned by the left? Because the left is smart and the right is dumb?
You are of course completely right. There are educators out there teaching creation as science, but anyone with half a brain wouldn't call that science or education. You can learn that in one day in a sunday school class. If you wan't the ability to cure cancer through genetic engineering or the ability to diagnose and cure Alzheimer's or Parkinson's then you will have to take more time than what the average right wing teacher gives their student's in knowledge and understanding of the world around them.
Where do you get the idea that education is somehow owned by the left? Because the left is smart and the right is dumb?
Yes.
once more into the breach
Have you noticed how your mom, sister, aunt, girlfriend, wife, daughter, and female friends haven't died from cervical cancer? You can thank public science (and NIH/NCI) for that.
Have you noticed how you haven't died from lung cancer yet? You can thank public science for that.
Have you noticed that things around you are made from plastic? Have you noticed that 'medicine' now involves surgeries and anti-bacterial treatments rather than voodoo and shrunk heads? Have you noticed how we can build rockets that take us into space, predict likelihood of certain diseases by reading an individual beings genome, troll unfortunates on the internet, scan individuals for relatedness, fly with the birds? Yes, publicly funded research has led to a vast improvement for our civilization.
I get the feeling your argument is more on the emotional axis than the logical one.
Those aren't scientists, however convenient for your argument that might have been.
Taken as part of the social contract that is the United States citizenship under the United States Constitution as specified in Article 1 Section 8.
If you don't agree with the social contract that comes with being a citizen of this nation, you are free to move to a nation that has no social contract or taxes that come with it. I hear Somalia is nice this time of year, and it fits your demand nicely.
Yup. Those coal mining jobs he was elected to bring back will be coming back any day now. Any day now.