As a commuter to campus, my last few visits to the pump have been painful. There are already estimates out showing gas is probably going to hit around $5 a gallon this summer, according to a CNBC article. President Barack Obama gave a speech on energy production Thursday at the University of Miami, emphasizing the need to focus on renewable energy sources to offset rising gas prices. One of his main talking points was the Energy Department’s new $14 million investment into researching algae as a fuel source, according to a Department of Energy news release.
Although the idea of using algae as a fuel source is new to most people, it has been a popular research topic for a while. The problem with research around algae as a bio-fuel is that though a lot of money is being dumped into the field, the stuff isn’t cheap. The costs of producing algae-based bio-fuel is still way too expensive to compete with the relatively low cost of gasoline production, despite a continually reducing supply of fossil fuels, according to a Reuters article. A lot of the research going into algae are producing other discoveries: Chemists have discovered algae can be used in cosmetics to improve their ability to block sunlight and prevent skin damage, as well as in cookies to produce ingredients with lower saturated fats, according to Reuters. The hope, however, is the $14 million going into research ends up helping GMC and Ford more than Sephora and Sally Field, but that might not happen.
The problem is funding for scientific research into alternative energy has been based less on the feasibility of finding alternatives to existing fuel sources and more on the ability of the idea of exciting voters. But alternative energy decisions based on politics instead of research can and do backfire.
The government invested around $528 million from the first economic stimulus package into Solyndra, a company that specialized in tubular solar paneling, only to lose the investment in September when the company filed chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to a CBS article. There has been a good deal of argument since then as to whether the decision to invest in Solyndra was based more on political motivation to promote alternative energy than sound scientific research. Analysts within the solar industry have said many already knew Solyndra was not a good investment prior to the stimulus due to its inability to compete with cheaper solar paneling from Europe and Asia, according to an article on cnet.com.
So how can we make decisions on what scientific endeavors and research receive funding that is less political and potentially costly? If the decisions were directly in the hands of the general population, the odds of being able to understand some of the topics and make an educated decision on them are slim. Just like a panel of physicists probably wouldn’t be the best group to write the AP style manual, non-experts wouldn’t be able to properly guide the direction research is headed.
Other means of decreasing the influence of elected politicians might involve the public using some sort of democratic mechanism to decide what end result they would like to see and then having experts and professionals within specific disciplines helping to achieve these goals. However, any possibility of this happening or of finding alternatives to rising fuel costs is going to depend on the willingness of the political class in this country to put aside partisan motives and embrace scientific realities and findings objectively, without putting their political careers first. Just to be safe, I will be riding my bike to campus.