Global warming has become a political crusade rather than a rational engineering policy decision. While educational and insightful, highly-publicized movies such as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car may only serve to polarize the issue even further. In light of such movies, Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post that:

The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology….The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it’s really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don’t solve the engineering problem, we’re helpless.

While the nation’s engineers are certainly up to the task to fight the impending energy crisis, the nation’s budget may not be. As reported in Engineering &, projects that address this issue are generally radical, large scale, and expensive, and the government is regrettably allotting fewer and fewer R&D funds in these areas. Read more from Samuelson’s call for engineers and political truce in the Washington Post.

Image courtesy of www.climatecrisis.net