In the January 29, 2007 edition of Time Magazine, Montana Democrat Governor Brian Schweitzer was asked how Democrats could make energy an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Here's what Schweitzer said: I can do it in a 60-second spot," he said. "Put me on the clock." And he was off…
It's about time. As reported in the NYT: The House voted this evening to rescind $14 billion worth of tax breaks and subsidies for oil drillers and channel the money into a fund that would finance renewable energy projects and new technologies for conserving energy. Despite opposition from the oil…
It's snaining, again. Oh, no, it's snaining again. This word is one I got from my father, who always said it with an appropriate sneer. Rain, sleet, and snow all rolling in at once. He'd never seen this sort of weather until he moved to the Midwest the year I…
Not after reading this article about pig-farming in Rolling Stone. This is the teaser at the top of the article: America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to…
I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.
Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.
We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill …
