Mar 25 2009
What They’re Doing at MIT
On Monday, March 23, President Obama spoke specifically about clean energy, and described plans to spend about $59 billion in economic stimulus funds and $150 billion from the federal budget to promote a clean energy future. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, (aka the stimulus bill) officially includes $39 billion the Energy Department and $20 billion in tax incentives for clean energy. Even so, Obama didn’t say a lot that we haven’t heard before. In fact, he mentioned cap and trade and energy again on Tuesday night during his press conference. He’s a big fan of cap and trade (I’m not). I think we need to take more drastic action.
But the most interesting part of the speech were the remarks made by MIT President, Susan Hockfield, said before the President spoke. She described our current energy problems as: rapidly increasing energy demand, energy security, and solving the climate change crisis. Hockfield called clean energy an historic investment, and said the stimulus bill makes a major investment in energy stimulus, including 6.5 billion for R&D, which to her was the most important part, being the president of a major and prestigious university known for its research.
She called the stimulus bill the largest and most important investment in technology since Sputnik inspired the launch of the Apollo program.
Energy R&D technology proposals have profound potential as an economic catalyst. This is our route out of this recession, fundamental economic growth, including technological innovation, Hockfield said.
John Holdren’s committee, Obama’s new science adviser, wrote in a 1997 Pcast report, that every dollar invested in energy research and development results in a 40-fold return to the economy, in energy efficiency, energy savings, and in new technology.
U.S. research departments and labs are working on many of these problems. At MIT they are working seriously on big energy breakthroughs. They have made windows into highly efficient solar cells. They are inventing new materials that are making batteries longer lasting, safe, and rapidly charging. We can now think seriously of charging a car’s battery in the same amount of time it takes you to fill your car’s gas tank.
Susan Hockfield said they’re developing quantum dot light bulbs, which are 500 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, with no sacrifice in light quality. They are also bringing biology and engineering together, using benign viruses to make thin, transparent, lightweight batteries, and they’re working on mimicing photosynthesis, or as she called them, “nature’s own solar cells”. They are also working on developing safer and more effective nuclear power technologies, and “exploring strategies” to capture and sequester CO2. All of these new possibilities are the results of federally-funded research. Americans finest scientists need to transfer findings like this into a technological revolution.
We need new green industries and an energy revolution, and that’s why, she said, we need to fund this research.
But we will never get a revolution with “cap and trade” and this slow moving plan to rebuild bridges and weatherize homes. That won’t solve climate change. I hope the scientists and researchers are moving more quickly on all of this than the government is. Even some of the Democrats are wary of “changing our economy” by implementing new enviromental things that Obama wants. Who are they kidding? The economy we have now sure isn’t so great and it could do with a whole lot of change. Now is the time.
