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This story I read over morning coffee today is one of the most
disturbing for me in awhile because it hits in the head and the gut.
Intellectually, our country's budget priorities seemed destined to sink
our children's futures unless dramatically reversed. Emotionally, the
news reports on the daily carnage from Iraq--which already choke my
spirit--have a new dimension. Our global future may decline tomorrow
and people are dying today because of our misplaced priorities that
favor military spending over our real national security needs for
energy independence. --David In Today's New York Times: Budgets Falling In Race to Race to Fight Global Warming In the United States, annual federal spending for all energy research and development — not just the research aimed at climate-friendly technologies — is less than half what it was a quarter-century ago. It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979, according to several different studies. Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, has nearly quadrupled, to $28 billion annually, since 1979. Military research has increased 260 percent, and at more than $75 billion a year is 20 times the amount spent on energy research. |