How short is our memory? To paraphrase Slashdot comment#43193173
His fisrt term he put $80 Billion towards this. You won't remember great hits like Solendra, A123, and Fisker. The list of companies getting the money from that original program read like a whos-who of campaign donors. Many of the companies went bankrupt quickly after getting the federal money and none of them produced anything usable.
The track record is this will be a slush fund to reward his friends and accomplish nothing useful. Corrupt politics and corporate cronyism at its finest.
I certainly support research, but isn't there a sequester looming? I would be happier if Obama took steps to raise taxes. At the place I work we lost an employee due to grant shortages.
The President doesn't set taxes. That's the job of congress, which is designed to make changing things hard. Obama can call for this and that, but all it takes is one senator to shut the whole process down.
He's being downvoted because his comment is extremely asinine. One person paying more than their share won't do anything, even if they are a billionaire.
It would be pretty cool if those who both could and wanted to contribute just did - like how open source software works. In practice taxes end up being pretty arbitrary and have unintended consequences. Lots of people actually agree with increased spending such as this and could easily fund these efforts. Those who don't agree could keep their money. Win-win!
From what I understand (and I may be wrong because people who are advocating rising taxes are not very good at explaining their position), the idea is not to increase government income/spending per se. The idea is to redistribute wealth and the government's income is irrelevant (hence the GP's saying it "won't do anything" despite the obvious increase of this income).
For all we know a tax increase may decrease the total money collected by the government as the wealthy flee into more favorable tax regimes. This is all right from the point of wealth redistribution (it happens anyways as the local wealth decreases even through different means) but would be unacceptable from the income/spending point of view.
>> I certainly support research, but isn't there a sequester looming
Looming? No. It has already taken affect.
>> I would be happier if Obama took steps to raise taxes.
Do tell, what steps would you have him take? The Republicans have sworn to not raise taxes at all. They control the house and have unleashed a record smashing set of filibusters (and no, not the Rand Paul style) in the senate. Thanks to gerrymandering, they can (and must) hold stedfast to ideologues. There's also the corporate interests to look after.
>> At the place I work we lost an employee due to grant shortages.
Classic. You want taxes to be raised so your employment can be safeguarded. Meanwhile the grants, and jobs in turn, are a waste of time and energy.
Weaning the nation off fossil fuels entirely for its transportation needs may not be practical or realistic.
Reality never stopped a good government money grab before, why should it now?
Sarcasm aside, the idea is of course ridiculous. If/when viable alternatives to petroleum fuels are available, the transition will happen. Companies like Tesla and every major automobile manufacturer have R&D going on in this area right now. Grabbing $2 billion via a new tax on oil production will do nothing to further that, however. Look at results of similar "stimulus" spending a few years ago.
I guess DARPA is pretty ridiculous too, right? What have they ever come up with, what with their tax money grab and all?
In all seriousness, you're not helping. At all. Clearly R&D is doing well, but battery and other component prices are too high, while oil consumption has huge externalities that no one is ever forced to pay for. So yes, we're going to tax oil and pour the money into electrification of transportation. Get over it.
I want to live in a world where conversations can be had, where we can all sit down as a species and say, "Yes, this is what we want" or "no, we're going to pass on this." Unfortunately, there will always be people you will be unable to win over, unable to change their mind, even if the proper direction is a known. What then? We continue to argue? Forever tied in discussions without any forward progress?
The downsides of petroleum are clear. Its polluting, its limited, and we fight regional (check that, global) conflicts over it. Electricity is cheap, it's price is dropping quickly as more capacity comes online (solar, wind, natural gas where fracking is occurring), and its able to be moved across wide geographic areas extremely quickly. There is no reason oil shouldn't be taxed and those funds driven directly into renewables and electrified mobility.
Now, if you want to argue with me on facts, I am all ears. But until someone can prove we're not running out of oil, prove that we don't need a military to patrol the regions we extract that oil from, and prove that our economy can continue to function with a cartel controlling the literal fuel of the world economies, get the hell out of the way.
Oil is non-renewable; it's getting much more expensive to find ; and the US (my country) spends a huge portion of its tax revenue financing a military to ensure a constant supply of said oil.
The shift to renewables is already well underway, whether the OP wants it to or not. I'm not being combative. On the contrary, I'm simply stating they should accept the inevitable.
I expect in 50 years we will still have personal cars, but I'm split on whether they will be running on batteries, or running on some liquid fuel that we manufactured from environmental carbon.
I'd much rather see us spend 600 billion a year on energy, medicine, and other scientific research than on waging pointless wars to get more oil. Maybe then we wouldn't have to raise everyone's taxes to get something done, and could provide the results at a lower cost point since we don't have to rely on the private sector to invent just to let them have monopolies for 20 years. Just a thought.
(Note: that leaves ~100 billion in the defense budget, which is still more than any other nation on Earth spends except China).
I know DARPA has done some good work in the past - they are still mostly famous for their involvement in the early development of the internet in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
But does anyone have hard facts of how effective they are at applied problem solving? Or do they just get lucky every once in a while and have good PR? In particular have they developed some better way to run R&D programs?
I don't know but my limited interaction with their program managers did not impress me but this is purely anecdotal.
They also bankrolled much of the AI research during that period, which is still paying dividends today (because the state of the art hasn't advanced much in that field since DARPA pulled out). Also, tremendous improvements in robotics via funding UAV projects, etc.
What DARPA has is a lot of money without a lot of oversight. Don't underestimate the power of that model. If you look at the organizations that have been extremely effective at innovation, it's organizations where research isn't subject to market pressures. Bell Labs was bankrolled by AT&T's telephone monopoly. Xerox PARC was bankrolled by Xerox's extremely lucrative copier business. Intel, IBM, Google, etc. Innovation is associated with companies that have such tremendous market power that they can be benevolently forward-looking, instead of having to pinch every penny to survive in the dog fight that is a competitive market place.
Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" gives great insight into this aspect of the AT&T monopoly.
Both the required resources and lots of freedom does seem like a good recipe for innovation. Your historical examples make sense and I can think of many more. However when it comes to government sponsored research I need a little more convincing. Certainly there are good anecdotes and at $3B a year DARPA way be great relative value compared to DOE or NIH.
Thanks for pointing me to Tim Wu - very interesting analysis.
You mean like the "stimulus" spend that shot wind power from ~1% of the power grid to ~6%, approximately 8 years ahead of when most forecasters head predicated this would occur?[1] You mean the "stimulus" that caused renewables to be 55% of new power that went online in 2012? (Which is really significant when you consider demand is flat?[2])
I wish it was so easy. The 6% and 55% numbers for wind and renewables are percentage of CAPACITY not actual power used.
And your own references undermine your argument. In addition to qualifying that this is capacity the Bloomberg article goes on to mention the current weakness in the wind production equipment market and strength of gas. The Wikipedia article contradicts you in the second paragraph:
"renewable energy supplied 8%,[4] which was mainly from hydroelectric dams"
Unfortunately these numbers come out with a significant lag. EIA released the revised 2010 numbers on December 11th of last year. We get the initial version of the 2011 data in August.
As of 2010 wind supplied less than 1% of US energy consumption while solar and geothermal combined supplied less than 0.5%.
The latest report is linked below. Figure 1 might come as a bit of a shock but sadly this is where we are. And all the politics and complex business interest involved just make it more confusing.
The money grab happened in Obama's first term when they tried playing VC with clean energy concerns in the private sector. If this round goes toward academic research, then I think it will be more worthwhile. $2B pales in comparison to the amount of money our economy transfers to OPEC nations every year buying fossils fuels. There will be waste, no doubt, but funding R&D is one of the least objectionable things that my taxes go toward.
> If/when viable alternatives to petroleum fuels are available, the transition will happen.
"Are available"? You seem to misunderstand how things become available. Usually people spend time and effort to make them available. Financial incentives makes research departments and universities spend time on it.
> Companies like Tesla and every major automobile manufacturer have R&D going on in this area right now.
Surely that has not been enough.
> Grabbing $2 billion via a new tax on oil production will do nothing to further that, however.
"nothing"? You are horribly mistaken here as well. Progress is the direct result of people doing research. $2e9 pours many more researchers on the problem. I am curious to know how much R&D money has been spent on improving batteries in Sony, Apple, Tesla and other manufacturers altogether.
> Look at results of similar "stimulus" spending a few years ago.
Usually "quickly grab this money and do research" is less efficient than organic research. So, it all comes down to how the stimulus plan is executed. Nothing is wrong with the whole idea, though.
The market can and will not fix this. Thats the whole point. There are so many negative externalities associated with oil and all its derivative products (gasoline, combustion engine cars) that are not currently compensated for through taxes or the market. It's essentially an ongoing trillion dollar subvention, and "good government money" has been making up for it all along.
Many of these externalities are impossible to account for, even if we would be willing to do so. Leaded gasoline contributes to a rise in lead levels; lead causes mental retardation. What is the correct price to pay for inhibiting the mental capacity of whole generations?
I'm not convinced a (singular) massive capital investment is exactly a good idea... but Startups? Corporate R&D?
For it to be entirely efficient there has to be market incentives... such as having a clear economic outcome with manageable risk.
Otherwise it will mostly just be throwing money at it with hopes that something will come of it. Something the government is always more than willing to do. But more capital efficient channels... not so much
1) It's not just engineer and scientist time, but lab equipment, prototypes, etc, and the labor costs of all of those things, which dwarf engineer time in a capital-intensive area like transportation or energy.
2) Transport and energy are areas where the low-hanging fruit has already been harvested. Incremental improvements are enormously expensive in such areas.
To put the $2 billion figure into context, Intel spends $6-10 billion a year on R&D, most of which goes to fab/semiconductor research. That's what it costs to do the research just to go from 32 nm to 28 nm to 22 nm, etc, every 18 months. This is because semi-conductor research is frighteningly expensive, and is also an area where the low hanging fruit has already been harvested.
Making fundamental breakthroughs in energy and transport isn't a $2 billion research project. It's probably not even a $20 billion research project (the cost of the Manhattan Project). It might be a $200 billion research project (the cost of the Apollo Program).
Transportation is notoriously hidebound. The city of Detroit is a monument to that mindset.
There is a lot of low hanging fruit in simply applying well known techniques. For example, Toyota has made big advances by simply removing excess metal from their engines. GM could have beat them to it in the 1960s by hiring a few interns.
There is also a great deal of efficiency to be gained by insulating buildings. A comprehensive approach to automating insulation retrofits would give tremendous savings but would not take more than $50M or so for the engineering.
$700 billion to invade and control foreign countries, "offense" spending. $2 billion to reduce our reliance on oil sounds legit. I bet the military spends more than $2 billion annually on oil themselves.
Invading and controlling foreign countries costs far more than $700B, we've been doing it for over half a century and it's a few dozen trillion dollars so far.
Oh I know, like the last time government pumped massive amounts of money into biofuels and there was a massive food crisis in the 3rd world due to rocketing food prices which was caused by the government buying up massive amounts of corn for ethanol fuel.
I guess I just don't seem the point. Car manufacturers already see that this is the way to go, which is why we are seeing more electric cars / hybrids from car companies.
If the government really wanted to get cars off gasoline, why not raise the gas tax and stop the corn subsidies first? Higher (visible) prices for gasoline would push people toward smaller more energy efficient cars and public transit and it would make people pay for the externalities. Oh yeah.. that's politically unpalatable.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadHis fisrt term he put $80 Billion towards this. You won't remember great hits like Solendra, A123, and Fisker. The list of companies getting the money from that original program read like a whos-who of campaign donors. Many of the companies went bankrupt quickly after getting the federal money and none of them produced anything usable.
The track record is this will be a slush fund to reward his friends and accomplish nothing useful. Corrupt politics and corporate cronyism at its finest.
For all we know a tax increase may decrease the total money collected by the government as the wealthy flee into more favorable tax regimes. This is all right from the point of wealth redistribution (it happens anyways as the local wealth decreases even through different means) but would be unacceptable from the income/spending point of view.
Looming? No. It has already taken affect.
>> I would be happier if Obama took steps to raise taxes.
Do tell, what steps would you have him take? The Republicans have sworn to not raise taxes at all. They control the house and have unleashed a record smashing set of filibusters (and no, not the Rand Paul style) in the senate. Thanks to gerrymandering, they can (and must) hold stedfast to ideologues. There's also the corporate interests to look after.
>> At the place I work we lost an employee due to grant shortages.
Classic. You want taxes to be raised so your employment can be safeguarded. Meanwhile the grants, and jobs in turn, are a waste of time and energy.
Reality never stopped a good government money grab before, why should it now?
Sarcasm aside, the idea is of course ridiculous. If/when viable alternatives to petroleum fuels are available, the transition will happen. Companies like Tesla and every major automobile manufacturer have R&D going on in this area right now. Grabbing $2 billion via a new tax on oil production will do nothing to further that, however. Look at results of similar "stimulus" spending a few years ago.
In all seriousness, you're not helping. At all. Clearly R&D is doing well, but battery and other component prices are too high, while oil consumption has huge externalities that no one is ever forced to pay for. So yes, we're going to tax oil and pour the money into electrification of transportation. Get over it.
This is helping?
This is how you play into the politics of division. It's also how you make enemies and not get what you want as a result.
Don't play the combative divisiveness game. It's for suckers. It serves the politicians, it doesn't serve you.
"Don't play the combative divisiveness game. It's for suckers. It serves the politicians, it doesn't serve you."
I wish someone would say this every time people start yelling at each other over political decision.
The downsides of petroleum are clear. Its polluting, its limited, and we fight regional (check that, global) conflicts over it. Electricity is cheap, it's price is dropping quickly as more capacity comes online (solar, wind, natural gas where fracking is occurring), and its able to be moved across wide geographic areas extremely quickly. There is no reason oil shouldn't be taxed and those funds driven directly into renewables and electrified mobility.
Now, if you want to argue with me on facts, I am all ears. But until someone can prove we're not running out of oil, prove that we don't need a military to patrol the regions we extract that oil from, and prove that our economy can continue to function with a cartel controlling the literal fuel of the world economies, get the hell out of the way.
Oil is non-renewable; it's getting much more expensive to find ; and the US (my country) spends a huge portion of its tax revenue financing a military to ensure a constant supply of said oil.
The shift to renewables is already well underway, whether the OP wants it to or not. I'm not being combative. On the contrary, I'm simply stating they should accept the inevitable.
I expect in 50 years we will still have personal cars, but I'm split on whether they will be running on batteries, or running on some liquid fuel that we manufactured from environmental carbon.
(Note: that leaves ~100 billion in the defense budget, which is still more than any other nation on Earth spends except China).
But does anyone have hard facts of how effective they are at applied problem solving? Or do they just get lucky every once in a while and have good PR? In particular have they developed some better way to run R&D programs?
I don't know but my limited interaction with their program managers did not impress me but this is purely anecdotal.
What DARPA has is a lot of money without a lot of oversight. Don't underestimate the power of that model. If you look at the organizations that have been extremely effective at innovation, it's organizations where research isn't subject to market pressures. Bell Labs was bankrolled by AT&T's telephone monopoly. Xerox PARC was bankrolled by Xerox's extremely lucrative copier business. Intel, IBM, Google, etc. Innovation is associated with companies that have such tremendous market power that they can be benevolently forward-looking, instead of having to pinch every penny to survive in the dog fight that is a competitive market place.
Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" gives great insight into this aspect of the AT&T monopoly.
Thanks for pointing me to Tim Wu - very interesting analysis.
[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-18/u-s-wind-power-acco...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Con...
And your own references undermine your argument. In addition to qualifying that this is capacity the Bloomberg article goes on to mention the current weakness in the wind production equipment market and strength of gas. The Wikipedia article contradicts you in the second paragraph:
"renewable energy supplied 8%,[4] which was mainly from hydroelectric dams"
Only if you don't follow it far enough to find out it's 2010 numbers.
As of 2010 wind supplied less than 1% of US energy consumption while solar and geothermal combined supplied less than 0.5%.
The latest report is linked below. Figure 1 might come as a bit of a shock but sadly this is where we are. And all the politics and complex business interest involved just make it more confusing.
http://www.eia.gov/renewable/annual/trends/
"Are available"? You seem to misunderstand how things become available. Usually people spend time and effort to make them available. Financial incentives makes research departments and universities spend time on it.
> Companies like Tesla and every major automobile manufacturer have R&D going on in this area right now.
Surely that has not been enough.
> Grabbing $2 billion via a new tax on oil production will do nothing to further that, however.
"nothing"? You are horribly mistaken here as well. Progress is the direct result of people doing research. $2e9 pours many more researchers on the problem. I am curious to know how much R&D money has been spent on improving batteries in Sony, Apple, Tesla and other manufacturers altogether.
> Look at results of similar "stimulus" spending a few years ago.
Usually "quickly grab this money and do research" is less efficient than organic research. So, it all comes down to how the stimulus plan is executed. Nothing is wrong with the whole idea, though.
Many of these externalities are impossible to account for, even if we would be willing to do so. Leaded gasoline contributes to a rise in lead levels; lead causes mental retardation. What is the correct price to pay for inhibiting the mental capacity of whole generations?
For it to be entirely efficient there has to be market incentives... such as having a clear economic outcome with manageable risk.
Otherwise it will mostly just be throwing money at it with hopes that something will come of it. Something the government is always more than willing to do. But more capital efficient channels... not so much
2) Transport and energy are areas where the low-hanging fruit has already been harvested. Incremental improvements are enormously expensive in such areas.
To put the $2 billion figure into context, Intel spends $6-10 billion a year on R&D, most of which goes to fab/semiconductor research. That's what it costs to do the research just to go from 32 nm to 28 nm to 22 nm, etc, every 18 months. This is because semi-conductor research is frighteningly expensive, and is also an area where the low hanging fruit has already been harvested.
Making fundamental breakthroughs in energy and transport isn't a $2 billion research project. It's probably not even a $20 billion research project (the cost of the Manhattan Project). It might be a $200 billion research project (the cost of the Apollo Program).
There is a lot of low hanging fruit in simply applying well known techniques. For example, Toyota has made big advances by simply removing excess metal from their engines. GM could have beat them to it in the 1960s by hiring a few interns.
There is also a great deal of efficiency to be gained by insulating buildings. A comprehensive approach to automating insulation retrofits would give tremendous savings but would not take more than $50M or so for the engineering.
Oh I know, like the last time government pumped massive amounts of money into biofuels and there was a massive food crisis in the 3rd world due to rocketing food prices which was caused by the government buying up massive amounts of corn for ethanol fuel.
If the government really wanted to get cars off gasoline, why not raise the gas tax and stop the corn subsidies first? Higher (visible) prices for gasoline would push people toward smaller more energy efficient cars and public transit and it would make people pay for the externalities. Oh yeah.. that's politically unpalatable.