In this guest post, Americans for Energy Leadership Contributor Natalie Relich writes that energy poverty is one of the least discussed facets of energy and climate policy, yet is one of the greatest challenges confronting the world today. In this enlightening article, she discusses how American energy innovation can help solve the energy poverty challenge.
In the age of iPhones, Facebook, and Twitter, we have instant access to information and constant means of communication. It is difficult to imagine life without these luxuries, but they are just that, luxuries. For a large portion of the world these technologies are not only a rarity, but an impossibility, as there is no access to electricity.
1.5 billion people do not have access to electricity; 585 million of them living in Sub-Saharan Africa and 404 million in India. Three billion people, almost half of the world’s population, rely on biomass, such as wood, charcoal, and dung for cooking and heating purposes. Sub-Saharan Africa is an especially dire case. Only 31% of the population has access to electricity and the Sub-Saharan African population (excluding South Africa) of 791 million consumes as much energy annually as the city of New York, a population of 19.5 million, according to a recent IEA and UNDP report entitled “Energy Poverty: How to Make Modern Energy Access Universal.”
These people are living in energy poverty, the ramifications of which extend far beyond heating and cooking. Instead of children – usually young girls – going to school, they have to spend hours collecting firewood to heat their homes and cook. If the children are able to go to school, they can only do school work during daylight hours because they have no light to study by at night.
Energy poverty is one of the least discussed aspects of our current energy challenge, yet it poses serious threats to economies, national security, the environment, and public health throughout the world. It is unacceptable that such a massive social problem exists, yet here in the U.S. we do little to alleviate it. This article seeks raise awareness about energy poverty and to describe the threats posed by it and what is being done to remedy them.
Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and "An Inconvenient Truth." The latter backfired -- more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out -- the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.
It is a great pleasure to be here at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for this retrospective on "The Death of Environmentalism." In early 2005 Yale invited us to debate that essay, and since then the School has continued to demonstrate a genuine interest in what our friend and colleague Peter Teague has taken to calling ecological innovation. You train your students to ask hard questions -- we saw this first hand in 2010 Breakthrough Fellow and Yale School Masters candidate David Mitchell -- and your flagship publication, Yale360, is publishing some of the most interesting green thinkers today. We are grateful once again for this opportunity to reflect on the nearly seven years since we wrote our essay, and make some new arguments about what the green movement must do now.
Seven years ago the two of us started interviewing America's environmental leaders with the intention of writing a report on the politics of global warming for the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We came away from the experience deeply disappointed. Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge. None expressed much interest in rethinking their assumptions about the problem or the solutions. What we heard again and again during our interviews were the same old riffs that green leaders had been repeating since the late 1980's. Global warming would be solved through the same kinds of policies that we had used to address past pollution problems such as acid rain. Most were confident that John Kerry was, with their help, about to be elected president, and the biggest funders in the movement told us they were just a few steps away from passing cap and trade legislation.
That October we delivered our paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. While leaders at environmental philanthropies and national green groups hoped that the debate the essay started would just go away, "The Death of Environmentalism" struck a cord with many others and sparked a spirited debate. Many took the paper's arguments personally and, without question, the most common reaction to our essay was "I'm not dead." Our friend Adam Werbach gave a speech called "Is Environmentalism Dead," wherein he suggested that environmentalists make common cause with a broader coalition of progressive interests in hopes of building a broader and more diverse movement. And Yale's own Gus Speth questioned whether capitalism itself was compatible with ecological sustainability and suggested a radical shift in values was required to deal with the problem.
Over at the New Republic, Mark Muro and Jonothan Rothwell have published two posts on the intense geographic clustering of the 100 companies likely to make the greatest impact on the cleantech market in the next decade, a list developed by the Cleantech Group with The Guardian.
The scholars find that the cleantech market's most promising firms are concentrated in four major metropolitan areas: San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and Los Angeles. These areas house two-thirds of the companies on the list.
As Muro and Rothwell write: "It just goes to show the power of place. Innovative firms--in cleantech especially--really do seem to cluster together."
In the wake of serial disappointments, a new consensus is beginning to emerge that may guide climate and energy policy into a new and more constructive phase, with philanthropy poised to play a key role.
From the Chronicle of Philanthropy, February 20, 2011
By Lance Lindblom and Peter Teague
In the wake of serial disappointments, a new consensus is beginning to emerge that may guide climate and energy policy into a new and more constructive phase, with philanthropy poised to play a key role.
Environmental groups--and the foundations that support them--spent the past decade pressing a single approach to global-warming policy.
The problem was defined narrowly--if accurately--as the emission of too much heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere from the burning of oil, coal, and gas.
The solution was to reduce those emissions by making conventional energy expensive enough to change how individuals and corporations consume energy and, most important, to drive massive levels of private investment into energy efficiency and clean-energy alternatives.
The events of the past two years, however, with the failure of the environmentalists' strategy in the U.S. Senate and the collapse of international climate talks in Copenhagen, made it clear that substantially raising the price of fossil fuels is not a viable option.
Recognizing the need to rethink the problem and to open the conversation to a larger set of solutions, philanthropy has begun to support the development of new approaches focused on making clean energy cheap in absolute terms.
As Congress begins to debate whether the DOE deserves a funding increase to support innovation initiatives, a look at its record over the last two years will become a key point of contention. Organizations such as ARPA-E and the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) will come under particular scrutiny with regard to their cost and effectiveness.
Programs of any nature, whether public or private, will always have a mixed record of successes and failures. It is equally inevitable that proponents and opponents of a given program will focus on certain elements of that program in order to make the strongest possible case for their position. This disagreement can be healthy when it helps policy makers to get a complete and revealing assessment of that program. Once each argument is made in full, a productive debate can begin and the most effective policy can be crafted. However, the increasing polarization between proponents and opponents of government financial support for innovation is, at times, preventing this healthy debate from occurring.
Last week, a group of Senate Democrat leaders unveiled their plan to build off of the innovation-centered budget proposal released by the President two weeks ago, including several important investments in energy innovation, advanced manufacturing, and infrastructure.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced the proposal as an effort to simultaneously "create jobs, promote growth and help America win the future by making smart investments in education, innovation and infrastructure while cutting spending to live within our means."
The Senate Democrats' plan to judiciously invest in innovation and infrastructure while cutting wasteful spending elsewhere in the budget stands in sharp contrast to the Continuing Resolution bill passed by the House this weekend. The House bill budget would cut more than $60 billion from the federal budget to fund the government through FY2011, slashing several important energy innovation initiatives.
The House Republican's Continuing Resolution proposal to fund the government through the rest of Fiscal Year 2011 (FY11, ending Sept. 30) would slash energy innovation investments across federal agencies. The bill, H.R. 1, was introduced last Friday as the GOP's attempt to reduce the deficit and restore "fiscal responsibility," yet would nevertheless strip highly leveraged dollars from important federal programs, while representing merely a drop in the bucket of the $1.3 trillion federal deficit.
The Continuing Resolution as it stands would slice over two billion dollars from the DOE's budget alone and would have detrimental impacts on the state of American energy innovation. The budget cuts would force the layoffs of scientists and engineers, shrink the capabilities of laboratories and universities to perform the most critical cutting-edge energy research projects, and, by cutting funds for highly-leveraged loan guarantee programs, steer private sector funds away from American entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to demonstrate and deploy their innovative energy technologies on American soil.
The Continuing Resolution proposes cuts of at least 17% as compared to FY10 levels in each of the most innovation-oriented offices in the Department of Energy:
The agency which would be hardest hit would be the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which funds both the riskiest and most transformative, early-stage energy innovation projects, and would lose a staggering 75% of its budget under H.R. 1.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), which was responsible for roughly 34% of the DOE's energy innovation investments in 2010, would lose 35% of its FY10 budget.
The Office of Science, which funds critical early-stage energy innovation research, would see a 20% decline in its budget. Office of Science devoted 20% of its 2010 budget to energy innovation funding, while supporting additional fundamental physical science research.
The Office of Nuclear Energy, which devoted 41% of its funds to energy innovation projects in 2010, would lose 23% of its budget.
Meanwhile, the Office of Fossil Energy would see an 11% reduction in its budget. 43% of the office's 2010 budget was devoted to energy innovation efforts.
Today's E&E News covered the release of the Breakthrough Institute's most recent report, "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena", pointing to the report's conclusion that "increasing the efficiency of our power systems and gadgets will not necessarily yield great reductions in energy use and could lead to using even more juice". The article is excerpted below (subscription required).
In a new review of energy efficiency literature, researchers at the Oakland, Calif.-based think tank found that a "rebound effect" means that implementing low-cost efficiency improvements can increase overall energy consumption and can even lead to a higher net energy use in what they describe as a "backfire effect."
"The implications are serious for climate and energy policy," wrote Michael Shellenberger, the institute's president, in a description of the study. "Energy efficiency measures that pay for themselves are good for the economy but are not guaranteed to reduce energy consumption or emissions, and may in fact increase them."
The study's conclusion is not that policymakers should steer clear of efficiency improvements, which the institute's researchers say are good for economic growth, but that such improvements should not be counted on to reduce energy use or associated emissions.
The study points to several mechanisms that contribute to the rebound effect. More efficient use of energy leads to higher production, with that increased economic output tied to higher energy use overall. Efficiency also leads to the substitution of energy inputs for others like labor and capital with a resulting increase in energy use.
Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a simple and direct way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions.
Today Breakthrough Institute releases a new report finding extensive evidence that a large amount of the energy savings from below-cost energy efficiency are eroded by demand rebound, and that in some cases the rebound exceeds the savings, resulting in increased energy consumption from efficiency, known as backfire.
Leading government and international agencies, including the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate, and private consultancies such as McKinsey, have ignored or dismissed the strong evidence for rebound and even backfire in the peer-reviewed academic literature, resulting in climate mitigation scenarios that conclude that large emissions reductions can be achieved through greater efficiency. These agencies must, in future studies, take the evidence into account when constructing mitigation scenarios or risk a dangerous over-reliance on energy efficiency in climate mitigation strategies.
Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a simple and direct way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions.
Rebound and backfire could be mitigated through raising the price of energy. However, given the tight relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, climate mitigation must focus on cutting the relationship between energy consumption and emissions, which means moving to low-cost, zero-carbon energy sources.
"Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" finds extensive evidence and a strong expert consensus that a large amount of the energy savings from below-cost energy efficiency are eroded by demand 'rebound effects,' and that in some cases the rebound exceeds the savings, resulting in increased energy consumption from efficiency, known as backfire. The report contains a comprehensive review of the expert literature.
There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date.
In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.
The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.
In 1984, efficiency consultant Amory Lovins conducted an interview with Business Week where he said, "We will never get, we suspect, to a high enough price to justify building centralized thermal power plants again. That era is over." But between 1984 and 2000 the U.S. went from consuming 2,400 billion kilowatt-hours in 1984 to 4,000 billion kilowatt-hours in 2000. The increase came largely from coal and natural gas plants.
In 1984, efficiency consultant Amory Lovins conducted an interview with Business Week where he said, "we see electricity demand ratcheting downward over the medium and long term" and added, "We will never get, we suspect, to a high enough price to justify building centralized thermal power plants again. That era is over."
But between 1984 and 2000 the U.S. went from consuming 2,400 billion kilowatt-hours in 1984 to 4,000 billion kilowatt-hours in 2000, noted energy journalist Robert Bryce. Lovins complained to Bryce that Business Week misquoted him.
Breakthrough asked Bryce for a copy of the Business Week story, which is not on new Bloomberg/Business Week web site. Readers can see that Lovins repeatedly claims energy demand will decline.
Q. Electricity consumption is up something like 8% so far this year. Does that shake you at all?
A. (Amory) We would expect in the short term that a recovery would stimulate electricity demand to recover toward its previous levels. However, we see electricity demand ratcheting downward over the medium and long term.
The long-term prospects for selling more electricity are dismal. Imagine being in a business where most of your costs are fixed and 80% of your product is uncompetitive, and yet marginal supply of the kind you're used to buying is much more expensive than historic supply. If demand is as sensitive to price as we now suspect, raising utility rates will probably reduce long-run revenue.
And again here:
Q. At some point, though, won't utilities need to replace retiring base-load power plants?
A. (Amory) Only in the sense that the big hydro dams eventually silt up and have to be replaced. Far from there not being enough renewable sources to run an advanced industrial society, we will find there are too many. There won't be enough demand to support them all.
(Hunter) All the nifty solar technologies and everybody's favorite widget may compete with nuclear plants -- but can they compete with those light bulbs?
(Amory) The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon. We will never get, we suspect, to a high enough price to justify building centralized thermal power plants again. That era is over. The efficiency improvements are there to be bought. It is up to the utilities to choose participation rather than obsolescence.
Over at FrumForum, Republicans for Environmental Protection's Jim Dipeso argues that while the GOP's budget plans aim to slash energy innovation spending across-the-board, there's a more productive way to address the fiscal deficit, specifically, the way outlined by the report "Post-Partisan Power", published by a coalition of scholars at the Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, and American Enterprise Institute.
[The House Republican's] proposed budget resolution, setting spending levels for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, has knives out for energy science and technology research - for example, a 35 percent chop from 2010 levels for energy efficiency and renewables, and a 15% cut for nuclear R&D.
Yes, a fair argument could be made that all federal programs need to share the pain, but energy science and technology research doesn't amount to a teaspoon in a hurricane. All of the some $5 billion allocated to energy R&D each year could be zeroed out and the accountants at Treasury would hardly notice.
More importantly, energy R&D is long-range tech development that likely would not be picked up by private sector CFOs seeking more near-term returns for their risk capital. Once promising lines of inquiry are bunged up by federal budget politics, innovations that might have spawned new industries and smarter ways to use America's energy resources would fall by the wayside.
President Obama released his fiscal year 2012 budget proposal this morning, a solid endorsement of the necessity to increase public investment in energy innovation amidst proposals to indiscriminately cut discretionary spending across all federal programs. The President's budget proposal builds off of the innovation-centered economic growth strategy presented in the State of the Union Address last month and the White House Innovation Report released two weeks ago.
On the energy investment front, the budget proposal aims to increase the DOE's budget by 11.8 percent over FY2010's current appropriation levels, or $3.1 billion dollars, a comparatively small increase in an overall budget proposal of $3.7 trillion that proposes reducing the projected deficit by roughly $110 billion per year for the next ten years.
This budget increase is a vital step towards meeting the scale of the energy innovation challenge long-underlined by the Breakthrough Institute and by a general consensus of leading energy innovation experts, think tanks, and policymakers.
However, not all of these increases lie with funding for energy innovation. Using the Energy Innovation Tracker, a tool that compiles federal energy-innovation funding across nine federal agencies for the years 2009-2011, inclusive of ARRA, we've broken out investments in energy innovation (defined in the tracker as Basic Science, RD&D, and Education investments) from general energy investments in measures such as deployment, facility construction, and program management.
Do Nations Compete for Jobs and Industry?
by Roger Pielke Jr.
The image above comes from The Economist and shows the share of profits in the mobile phone industry, with the growing bright blue wedge representing Apple taking a big bite out of Nokia's profits. The Economist writes:
UNTIL 2007 Europe appeared to have beaten Silicon Valley in mobile technology for good. Nokia, based in Finland, was the world's largest handset-maker--and raked in much of the profits. But everything changed when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, the first smartphone that deserved the name.
Obviously there are relative winners and losers in the marketplace, but apparently many economists don't think that countries are in competition for jobs or industry. Writing in the NY Times yesterday, Gerg Makiw dismisses the notion of countries in competition with one another, as suggested by President Obama in the State of the Union:
Achieving economic prosperity is not like winning a game, and guiding an economy is not like managing a sports team.
To see why, let's start with a basic economic transaction. You have a driveway covered in snow and would be willing to pay $40 to have it shoveled. The boy next door can do it in two hours, or he can spend that time playing on his Xbox, an activity he values at $20. The solution is obvious: You offer him $30 to shovel your drive, and he happily agrees.
The key here is that everyone gains from trade. By buying something for $30 that you value at $40, you get $10 of what economists call "consumer surplus." Similarly, your young neighbor gets $10 of "producer surplus," because he earns $30 of income by incurring only $20 of cost. Unlike a sports contest, which by necessity has a winner and a loser, a voluntary economic transaction between consenting consumers and producers typically benefits both parties.
This example is not as special as it might seem. The gains from trade would be much the same if your neighbor were manufacturing a good -- knitting you a scarf, for example -- rather than performing a service. And it would be much the same if, instead of living next door, he was several thousand miles away, say, in Shanghai.
Listening to the president, you might think that competition from China and other rapidly growing nations was one of the larger threats facing the United States. But the essence of economic exchange belies that description. Other nations are best viewed not as our competitors but as our trading partners. Partners are to be welcomed, not feared. As a general matter, their prosperity does not come at our expense.
Rob Atkinson of ITIF has a great post up which critiques such conventional wisdom among economists that nation's are not in competition for jobs and industry. Here is a lengthy excerpt from Rob's post:
In a recent column, Innovation Conservative David Brooks calls out both Democrats and Republicans as perpetuating "mirages" for advocating cuts to discretionary spending as deficit reduction measures, and argues that those advocating for increased investments in productive areas need to band together to address entitlements, as growing entitlement spending will impose constraints on those investments in the future.
The White House report, "Strategy for American Innovation" lays out the Administration's plans to pursue federal investments in energy across the innovation cycle and signals an adoption of an innovation-based strategy for economic growth.
On Friday, the White House released its 2011 "Strategy for American Innovation", cementing President Obama's State of the Union call for renewed federal investment in the building blocks of innovation, to "out-invest, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." The report lays out the White House's energy innovation agenda that includes initiatives across the energy innovation spectrum and plans to pursue renewed investments in research, infrastructure, and education.
The report embraces the innovation-based strategy for economic growth long advocated by groups like the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. As Breakthrough Senior Fellow Fred Block argued in yesterday's Innovation-Deficit Debate, federal government support of the innovation system is critical to ensuring continued economic progress and prosperity.
The report contends:
"Innovation- the process by which individuals and organizations generate new ideas and put them into practice- is the foundation of American economic growth and national competitiveness...The standard lesson from economics, and history, is that an innovation-friendly environment requires public support on specific dimensions. Thus, the true choice in innovation policy is not starkly between government management and no government involvement, but rather choosing the right role for government in supporting private sector innovation."
The DOE's new SunShot Initiative will strive to close the price gap between solar electricity and fossil-fuel based electricity by the end of 2020, announced Secretary Chu today. This will mean bringing the cost of utility scale solar energy systems down by 75% to $1 per watt, such that it can compete with fossil-fuel based electricity in real, unsubsidized terms.
The creation of SunShot is consistent with the Breakthrough Institute's long-held proposals that public investment is necessary to catalyze an American energy transformation, by making clean energy cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in real, unsubsidized terms. Implicit in the creation of SunShot is the idea that substantial innovations will need to take place across the production cycle to bring down the cost of solar electricity. Resultantly, SunShot will bring together research efforts in government, industry, research laboratories, and academic institutions to drive down costs in every facet of solar energy production. This will start with an award of $27 million to nine new solar research programs that focus on strengthening the U.S. supply chain for solar manufacturing and commercializing cutting-edge PV technologies.
In a trio of events next week, Breakthrough thinkers will debate the importance of innovation to closing the deficit, explore the future of climate politics, and argue that "green heretics" will define the future of environmentalism.
In his State of the Union, President Obama explained why America must invest in energy, information technology, and drug innovation to grow its way out of the deficit. Republicans said that innovation is best left to the private sector, and reducing the deficit will help it to do so. Who's right?
From 12 noon - 1:30 pm EST on Monday (Feb 7) Breakthrough Senior Fellow Fred Block -- author of the new history of federal investment in innovations like pharmaceutical drugs, computers, and GPS, State of Innovation -- and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's Rob Atkinson will debate the distinguished conservative scholars, Jerry Taylor from the Cato Institute and David Kreutzer from the Heritage Foundation.
The topic is resolved: "The Federal Government should increase investment in innovation to accelerate economic growth and reduce the deficit." The debate will be moderated by the National Journal's chief economics correspondent, Jim Tankersley. To register click here. (Full details below.)
On Monday, I appeared on an hour-long webinar hosted by theEnergyCollective.com on China and Energy, diving into questions of energy innovation, competitiveness, and the challenge of meeting China's soaring demand.
Carolyn Bartholomew, a commissioner on the US-China Economic Security and Review Commission joined myself and moderator Marc Gunther to dive into the issues at stake.
We discussed how China can be both the world leader in clean and dirty energy, simultaneously leading the world in the production of clean energy technologies and global contributions to climate-destabilizing carbon dioxide and coal consumption; the economic stakes of the global clean energy race and China's rising prowess in clean tech innovation and production; and the huge scale of energy demand in the rapidly developing nation.
Listen to the audio - "China and Energy" webinar, 1/31/11: (length 01:01:10)
Last week, President Obama threw down an ambitious national goal in his second State of the Union Address: by 2035, 80% of America's electricity will come from "clean" energy sources, double the share we now derive from clean sources.
But what counts as "clean," how do we get there, and is the goal feasible?
Dr Nathan Lewis, a distinguished professor of chemistry at CalTech and direct of the new, Department of Energy-funded Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub (which also got a shout-out in the President's SOTU) appeared on NPR/WBUR's "On Point" radio yesterday, to discuss the President's clean energy objectives, the energy innovation challenges that must be overcome to reach that goal, and the economic and environmental consequences at stake.
I highly recommend you give the segment a listen here.
China will be the second largest global R&D investor in 2011 while U.S. investment in R&D will slow, according to a new survey by Battelle and R&D Magazine.
Growth in U.S. R&D investment will slow this year, while China is expected to eclipse Japan for second place among all nations in R&D investment, according to a new analysis released by Battelle and R&D Magazine.
The United States is still far and away the global leader in terms of total investment, and is expected to invest $405 billion in 2011. The Battelle team predicts that increases in U.S. R&D investment will slow to 2.4% in 2011, however, equal to the median global rate.
China has increased R&D investment by 10% each year for the last 10 years, sustaining this rapid growth rate through the global recession. Battelle estimates that China will invest $154 billion in R&D in 2011, passing Japan's $144 billion.
While the United States continues to lead in overall funding, in the last decade R&D has become increasingly globalized, as foreign governments boost their investment in R&D and innovation capacity, and multinational corporations have decentralized R&D activities across both advanced and emerging economies.
Seems it might be about as easy to convince someone global warming is fake by pointing to the serial nor'easters slamming the east coast as it is to persuade an individual that global warming is fact by placing them in a warm room, reports the NYT:
The study, by Jane Risen, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, and Clayton Critcher, a marketing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that university students placed in a heated room expressed higher confidence that global warming was a proven fact than those placed in a neutral control room...
"These results suggest that the mere experience of heat influenced belief in global warming," the researchers wrote...
Liberals and conservatives were similarly influenced by the raised temperatures, and the effect was present even when attention was drawn to the temperature of the room.
