Well, yeah, that's by design. What incentive does the government have to spend money on renewables? They can just make policies that incentivize everybody else to do it.

"Big Energy" is down with renewables because they are unreliable enough that the whole grid needs to be backed by oil and gas to 100% capacity. The high principle investment and parts/ repair turnover along with the plentiful eco-contracts to go around make for reliable revenue streams. Energy industry gets to have their cake and eat it too.

You know what doesn't make alot of revenue? Nuclear power. Because it's like 100-1000x more efficient than oil, gas or renewables. My point is if government didn't fund nuclear research nobody would, it's too cheap. Lots of people are willing to fund renewables because it makes them money.

5 years ago it looks like they were #4, just below the Uzbeks and just above Italy.

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Same here.

That's interesting! I love cherries.

Why can’t Canadians get cherries year round at our grocery stores, as we do grapes or strawberries?

NREL budget 2020: approximately $500 million, up from $372 million three years earlier.

So no, the federal investment in renewables research has been negligible compared to virtually every other energy technology. Almost all the research has been privately funded.

This subreddit is literally about data representation, not about the content itself. This isn't about trusting data.

So you can either buy a social media platform to destroy, or you can subsidise many decades of research into an amazing new, clean energy source, and still have billions left. What a difficult choice!

Think about how much cheaper it would have been to spend that money on trains instead.

> Italy is like “We got some cherries. You want some? They are over there.”

Calm down, Padre.

> These immigrants, mainly from Haiti and Venezuela, have driven labor costs down...

Interesting. We always hear that those who oppose more immigration or want less of it do so because they're racists or xenophobes. Turns out they just don't want to be driven into poverty and/or unemployment.

At first I thought the chart just lacked countries that aren't top 4 currently, but apparently whoever made it just picked some very random countries to add to the comparison since Italy's not even in the top 5 and Uzbekistan is very arguably in it up to 2020.

I agree this isn't really beautiful data, but also you shouldn't just trust a graph that only shows 4 data points, obvs there were more countries not pictured.

My source is the chart. Literally it shows moving from 4 to 3. If this chart isn’t capturing it went from 8 to 3, then this isn’t beautiful data.

We knew it could happen and it has actually been happening since the 10's at least, but nothing changes really. So I'm doubting it won't last long.

Interesting, I would have thought it was Chilli

They were number eight four years ago, weren't even in the top 5 2019, what are your sources for saying they were number 4 lol

Turkey has a steady ~3.68% average growth per year 2016-2021, Chile had a ~20,08% average growth in that period, way more impressive in terms of development, but of course Turkey is still going to be #1 for a long time since they have such a developed industry already.

They weren't even top seven 5 years ago, wtf are you talking about lol

This year's funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.

They don't make public their awards budget, it's a staggering amount of our economy. And we all know how messed up those government contracts are. They have no problem shelling out 5k for a coffeemaker

Also, it wasn’t money invested for zero carbon initiatives. It’s money invested because we knew we’d run out of affordable oil eventually and didn’t want to be completely hosed when that happened.

From…. Number 4. Moving from the number 4 to 3 spot isn’t exactly a monumental shift. The bigger story is Turkey absolutely slaying the cherry market.

Dude, there's been probably almost a trillion dollars spent on solar at this point.... Costs have barely been reduced in the last decade, when most of the money has been spent. Not to mention hardly applicable to half the world's climate.

If all of Europe had stuck with nuclear power they'd be energy independent right now. The $585 billion Germany spent on solar and wind infrastructure coulda been spent updating their nuclear plants, and Putin would have next to no chips to play with. You have your priorities mixed up.

Yeah and that’s nice to have standing armies but large standing armies are not the name of the game anymore. It’s all about military tech, rockets, vehicles, etc. None of the countries conscripting are contributing even close to the amount the US does.

The sole reason these people are conscripted is so that they can learn how to use the equipment that we have developed for them

I wasn't comparing the feasibility of fusion vs perpetual motion. I was using the wasted time and effort put into researching something to demonstrate why it's not a reasonable to compare r&d costs to the amount of money spent on obtaining a known energy source.

Billions are spent on all sorts of energy research. Solar, hydro, chemical, biological. The overwhelming majority will go nowhere. Some end up being outright scams, like perpetual motion devices. Picking one that might eventually work and saying "God we're dumb for not doing this instead of using oil" is like saying people are dumb for having bought stocks other than Amazon in the 90s.

Or are you going to tell me how actually stocks are a financial entity so it's not a fair comparison to energy.