ScienceInsider

Thirty-four U.S. Nobel Laureates today called on President Barack Obama to push for a steady funding mechanism in upcoming climate legislation to support clean energy research. Many billions of dollars are already flowing from stimulus funding, they note in a letter to Obama, but in 1.5 years that will all be spent. Billions more would flow from the Waxman-Markey bill passed recently by the House of Representatives, they concede, but most of that would go toward deploying technologies already in hand.

All that funding “is not enough to achieve goals for 2050” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, physics Nobel laureate Burton Richter said at a press conference held by the Federation of American Scientists. “Transforming the energy sector is a huge undertaking. To get what we need tomorrow, we need to invest more starting now.”