Re: SC33

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18003/

Alternative-Energy Spending Fizzles Out

Congress ends without funding research programs, as the United States falls behind in alternative technologies.

Despite the hype and numerous promises that began 2006, including President Bush's declared plans to curb the United States' addiction to oil, the 109th Congress ended the year without allocating funding for proposed increases in research spending for alternative energy.

Although Bush proposed a fiscal-year 2007 budget that would have increased funding for some renewable-energy resources, including solar and biomass, as well as for research into hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, the budget was not passed. Instead, Congress passed a stop-gap continuing resolution that will keep the budget at 2006 levels, which, because of inflation, amounts to a cut in funding, and it specifically decreases funding in some cases...........

.........Some experts are warning that the cuts come just as much more money is needed to address energy-security concerns such as unstable oil prices and global warming. "We spent $9 billion last year on the strategic defense initiative R&D," says Joseph Romm, founder and director of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, who headed the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy under President Clinton. Romm says the budget "for all energy efficiency and all renewable energy is something like a billion. Given that the scale of the problem with global warming and our oil imports is so humongous, we're hardly addressing the issue at all."............

European Countries are begining to try and implement policies to prepare for Peak Oil and dramatic Climate Change, the US policy continues in its denial of whats coming, and will be in no position to be prepared for the realities of dwindling energy, and the harsh repercussions of our world's growing erratic climate resultant in large measure to man's burning of hydrocarbon fuels.