Before anyone gets too excited over this proposal, you might want to consider how government funding for science in the year 2009 works in practice. Here is an except from a blog post that describes how the Energy department works from the inside ( source: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-... ):

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Basically, my mother got involved with this world by accident. More or less everyone else in Efficiency and Renewable Energy was there because they were true believers. My mother was there because her kids had gone to college, and she needed a job. So she wound up as a budget and policy analyst, working for the true believers.

This drove my mother up the wall. She is basically an honest person. She does not have the skill sets to work effectively as a member of a criminal organization, and she certainly did not expect the United States Department of Energy to be anything of the sort.

Yes: that's exactly what I said. Joe Romm should be in prison. James Hansen should be in prison. Michael Mann should be in prison (and not for making Heat). These people are criminals. Sadly, no one will be arresting any of them any time soon.

What my mother found at EERE was a sort of giant, Potomac-shaped hog-trough, dispensing a billion or two a year to grunting Beltway bandits packed shoulder-to-shoulder around a vast open sewer of hot, juicy, delicious cash. This is, of course, the iron triangle of Washington fame. (I think the triangle should include at the very least the press, making it a square, which would let us add Andrew Revkin to our fantasy arrest list. All you coup plotters out there, listen up. These guys are all buddies - you can probably nab all four at the same Super Bowl party.)

In order to keep said open sewer open, EERE planners (such as my mother) had to go through the following process: they had to analyze a constant flow of scientific and engineering information from the renewable-energy researchers they supported (typically experienced recipients of such grants, which is why they call them "Beltway bandits"), decide which technologies seemed promising and which did not, support the former and cut the latter.

Now: my mother was at DOE in the mid-90s. How many successful renewable-energy technologies can you name that came out of DOE in the mid-90s? Or came out of anywhere in the mid-90s? Or came out of anywhere at all? What are the successes of renewable energy?

For that matter, even today, how many press releases have you seen reprinted in your newspaper of choice, promising that renewable-energy technology X - algae biofuel, perhaps, or Stirling engines, or thin-film solar-panels; the list is endless - would hit the market a year from now, two years from now, five years from now? For how many years have you been seeing these types of announcements? How many renewable-energy technologies have hit said market?

The reason, of course, is that most of these technologies simply don't work. At least, not in the sense of being even remotely cost-effective. Of course, one can still tinker with them, and one never knows how tinkering will turn out. But what would happen at EERE, over and over again, is that some research program would promise result X by year Y, fail, add 1 to Y, and get more money for next year.

My mother's job was not to evaluate renewable-energy technologies. It was to pretend to evaluate renewable-energy technologies - creating the essential illusion of science-driven public policy. Since everyone involved in this process understood that it was a farce, you can imagine the quality of the data. Meanwhile, as usual in Washington, how much money you got depended on how many friends in the right places you had. This tends not to change from year to year, resulting in remarkably consistent budget allocations.

In other words, my mother's work was bullshit in the best Frankfurtian sense. Some might get a kick out of this, but she is just not the type. And at the time, Artificial Global Warming was not the big thing it is now. So the open sewer seemed picayune. A billion here, a billion there. It sounds big to the hoi-polloi, but of course it isn't. What was not obvious in the late '90s is that, if you can steal billions, you can steal trillions. And that is a big deal.

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