Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire: The Energy Race: China Has Sputnik, We've Got No Apollo - Reaction to Secretary Chu's recent speech

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Energy Race: China Has Sputnik, We've Got No Apollo - Reaction to Secretary Chu's recent speech

China and the U.S. may not be destined for happy carbon-beating agreements at this year’s UN climate change meeting, which is going down now in Cancun, Mexico. But the country’s lone efforts to clean up its act are turning the U.S.’s old environmental scapegoat into its Sputnik.
That is, it’s lighting a fire under our economically-depressed and environmentally-unsound butts, or it should be. Thomas Friedman has made the Sputnik analogy before and in a recent speech at the National Press Club, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked it up.
To up the ante, and prepare for a future when carbon emissions are not just bad but taxed, the U.S. needs more and better energy technology research, he said. “The 2010 federal budget is $3.6 trillion, of which 0.14 percent went for research and development related to energy,” he said. Our energy R&D spending peaked in 1979.
He went on, says the Times

In 1998, he said, the American share of worldwide high-tech exports was nearly 25 percent and China’s was less than 10 percent; by 2008, he said, China’s share was 20 percent and the American share was less than 15 percent…. In 2009, for the first time, a majority of United States patents were issued to foreigners, he said, and two Chinese universities, Tsinghua and Peking, are “the two largest suppliers of students who receive Ph.D.’s in the United States.”

Here’s the speech: Go to link and vido

Secretary Chu laid out the numerous technology fronts on which the United States must innovate or lose. Among them: high voltage transmission, which is more efficient and can carry much more power over longer distances, high speed rail, an area in which China currently rules, advanced coal tech, like low-emission and efficient Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants as well as that controversial “clean coal” Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), nuclear power, alternative energy vehicles (China wants to produce 5 million new energy vehicles and 15 million fuel-efficient conventional vehicles by 2020), renewable energy (they just became the world’s most attractive country for it for the first time), and supercomputing, in which China’s Dawning Nebulae recently became boss.
In other words, we need to build an Apollo – except instead of going to the Moon we need to make a better Earth.
Sure, you can use that tag line, Mr. President. I know you’re not going to, but you can.
http://motherboard.tv/2010/12/1/the-energy-race-china-has-sputnik-we-ve-got-no-apollo