Abstract
As concerns of environmental distress and energy security continue to be key components of the political discourse, renewable energy becomes a more attractive solution for the replacement of fossil fuels and it will become increasingly important to understand the ways that federal funding and policy can effect change in this area. This paper examines the partisan aspects of federal research and development funding for energy as well as the impacts of this funding on utilization of renewable energy during the period from 1961 through 2007. It achieves this by using a statistical approach to answer the questions of 1) whether the party of the President is significantly correlated with the amount or research and development funding provided and 2) whether public funding for energy research and development drives utilization of renewable energy in public and private energy markets. Two primary conclusions are reached: 1) A partisan component exists for energy R&D funding where Democratic Presidents have budgeted significantly more money for research than Republican Presidents and 2) There is a correlation between energy R&D spending and utilization of renewable energy, but the strength of the correlation and the true causal mechanism requires more granular data to understand.
Download
- Full Paper
- Dec. 8, 2008 - (PDF: 792 KB)
- Presentation
- Dec. 1, 2008 - (PDF: 934 KB) - Note: some artifacting - sorry
Data and Resources
Data and charts will be posted once I clean them up. If you would like it sooner, please email me (see below)
Questions
For questions, please send me an email. The address is a ucdavis.edu address where my name is nrsantos
