ABSTRACT
Many conferees, as has been noted, agreed a danger does exist that the government will rely more than it should on energy R&D funding and less on alternative measures in dealing with energy problems due to biases in the public decision-making process. Despite this possibility, many participants felt strongly that two billion dollars a year in government funding for energy R&D over the next five years was not too much, contrary to Part I. Given the seriousness of our energy problems, the importance of energy to our standard of living and national well-being, and the small amount of money involved compared with the total government budget or GNP, some thought that even more could be wisely spent.
Certainly I don’t think anybody feels that the dollar impact of spending two or three billion dollars a year in just terms of the money itself is really a problem ….
If you take the broad view … that the purpose of the R&D is to look at all these options of providing inexpensive, abundant energy in the future that is environmentally clean, provides low cost to the consumer, and is socially desirable from the point of view of life style, one could easily argue that you need a lot more R&D than what we are talking about.
