For weeks, there’s been a growing chorus — from the incoming Obama team to community-welfare campaigners and environmental bloggers — pushing for building the economic revival around “green jobs.” So far the focus seems to be mainly on rebuilding physical infrastructure: insulating leaky low-income housing, building wind turbines, improving the clunky electrical grid and the like. These are, by almost any measure, logical starting points for an effort to cut America’s energy bill and carbon dioxide emissions while restoring prosperity.

But for such an initiative to be green at a scale sufficient for the atmosphere to notice, my sense is it will need to focus just as much on rebuilding the country’s intellectual infrastructure. I’m not quite sure I’ve heard any leader yet describe the sustained, aggressive “energy quest” that would be required to lead the world toward a future with non-polluting energy choices sufficient to empower more or less 9 billion people — and how that quest would have to extend from the living room to the boardroom, from the laboratory to the classroom, to be transformational. [UPDATE 12/10, A call for a cabinet-level Department of Innovation.]

As our ongoing Energy Challenge series and plenty of independent studies have made clear, the country and world are still not engaged seriously in advancing non-polluting energy technologies, from solar cells to the elusive notion of capturing carbon dioxide from power plants at a large scale and stashing it somewhere. (One phrase that reverberates almost as much as green jobs these days in climate-energy discussions, with far less credibility, is “clean coal.”)

The latest overview of science and engineering trends from the National Science Foundation includes lots of warning signs. In the meantime, above you can see the latest graphical portrait of taxpayer investments in basic research in arenas that have mattered over the last half century. (The graph was updated for me by Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from the version I used in the recent post examining what an “energy moon shot” might look like.)

In the graph, you can see the Apollo moon shot (yellow), the war on cancer (blue), and the dribble of research on energy through Republican and Democratic eras (with a bit of an uptick of late). Below, for comparison, is federal spending on military research compared to the entire portfolio above.

Spending on basic R and D for military projects has hit about $80 billion a year, far more than the country spends on all other basic R and D combined. What might happen if a president sought not to shrink the military research pie, but simply devote more of it to transformational technologies related to harvesting, storing, or moving energy (something I put on the recent Dot Earth list of low-budget ways a president might improve the planet)?

After all, the Pentagon has already concluded that improved energy technology and efficiency are prime objectives, along with reducing turmoil in dangerous regions (one way possibly would be to offer cheap, renewable energy choices).

A host of experts in technological innovation agree that research money, alone, is insufficient. But without it, there’s no pipeline of ideas for entrepreneurs and investors to turn into products. A case in point: At the recent Bioneeers conference, there was a fascinating session on biomimicry, in which hints from nature shape industrial designs or architecture.

A presentation by a vice president of WhalePower, a Canadian company designing efficient turbine and fan blades with knobbly edges, inspired by humpback whale tails, mentioned in passing that the basic research was paid for by the Pentagon (seeking streamlined submarine designs).

There was a time when such a program might have won a “Golden Fleece Award” for wasteful spending. Can Congress and the public accept the idea that such work is as central to a sustainable energy future as painting roofs white?



Will the push for a green economy include a boost for those priming the innovation pump? There are signs that President-elect Barack Obama gets it. When Tom Brokaw asked him during his “Meet the Press” interview about who might visit the White House starting next year, Mr. Obama spoke of both children and scientists (an important combination if ever there was one):

“We want to invite kids from local schools into the White House. When it comes to science, elevating science once again, and having lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars or breaking down atoms, inspiring our youth to get a sense of what discovery is all about.”

I’ve got to add one final note about a fairly subtle point in that National Science Foundation report on science and engineering — the distinction between the two components of R and D — basic research and development work on promising ideas. The political tendency is to spend on development, while the report notes that breakthroughs come mainly from blue-sky basic research.

This excerpt explains why Switzerland has such an outsize profile in the breakthrough business:

Basic research plays a special role in developing new technologies. Basic research generally has low short-term returns but builds intellectual capital and lays the groundwork for future advances…. Among O.E.C.D. countries with available data, Switzerland has the highest basic research/ GDP ratio at 0.8%, significantly above the U.S. and Japanese ratios of 0.5% and 0.4%.

The report notes adds that Switzerland “boasts the highest number of Nobel prize winners, patents, and science citations per capita worldwide.”

Enough said?