Obama to announce $2 billion plan to get US cars off gasoline
nature.com
nature.com
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.