You can confirm this for me, but I believe American innovation has always driven a sense of national pride. In fact being at the leading edge of scientific discovery and having mechanisms in place so that innovators are able to transform the best discoveries into commercially/industrially manufactured consumer products has driven not just America's improved standard of living in the past, but has shown much of the rest of the world a formula for success.
In Australia much of our industrial base is as a direct result of following a well worn path that the United States blazed in the last century. From the Automobile to Air transport, computing to networking, food production to textiles, the US has led the way.
So if the country is to keep this up, as the world is a highly connected, competitive place, headlines like the one above should spark up most American's interests. The quote above is from John Podesta at an Arpa-E Energy Innovation Summit underway in Wahsington DC right now. Arpa-E being of course the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy. You know the guys who had something to do with inventing the internet...
Arpa-E Program here
Wow. 2/3 of PhDs granted by US universities this year willl be to foreign born students, according to CEO of Lockheed
Regular theme at #arpae summit is (slipping) US global competitiveness. GE's Immelt, KP's Doerr, etc.
Karsner wrapped to Q&A w/ scaling is happening, it just isn't happening here - we cannot afford to lose more time
ARPA-E Summit: China is spending $12M per hour on clean energy R&D (John Podesta)
ARPA-E Summit: US govt investment in energy is "criminally small" (John Doerr)
ARPA-E Summit thoughts: we need the equivalent of the Tea Party Movement to secure our energy future and independence.
John Doerr again: the voice present here today needs to ADVOCATE LOUDLY over next 60 days: price on carbon, price on carbon, price...
John Doerr entrepreneurs do mire than you can imagine with less than you can imagine
ARPA-E Summit: takes an order of magnitude more investment to succeed in energy tech than in IT (Bloom vs Google) (John Doerr)
we have lost our sense of great heights & admiration. We are not the people of 9/11-we are the people of July 4th-
But I'm in a room full of entrepreneurs who are hopeful but frustrated. Shift happens - but slowly so far.
Japan spending 3x US RD on energy (as a percentage of GDP).
Immelt: tried to create an open organizational architecture because we (GE) need you: the entrepreneurs, researchers, VCs
Immelt: need energy policy for security, technology, job creation, pollution reduction; can't afford complacency.
Liquid metal batteries, artificial photosynthesis, new wind turbine designs, carbon capture techs. Fun stuff.
Chu: "Galileo didn't invent the telescope; he improved it, and turned its learnings back towards science."
US can lead in clean energy but must act. We don't lead now. Jeff Immelt, GE
Follow Arpa-E Tweets
Rather than go into a long and detailed diary on this subject, what I have included above are some of the highlight Tweets from the summit, and would suggest for every American that believes in the promise of your great country, to act in its interests.
There is an action call up by Repower America in association with a number of other groups to call your senators in the next 72 hours. I hope something above will move you to do so.
CALL YOUR SENATOR FOR CLEAN ENERGY JOBS
And let me finish with the quote of the day:
don't cede the century to the country that censors google (Tom Friedman)
(Note : I've just got through reading a 600 page Smart/Intelligent grid document and am working up to a diary on this. Please ring your Representative as I don't want it to be all for nought :-)