Global warming?

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

How do you know that?

I'm a Civil Engineer graduate student so I see all the research that is being done in alternative energy. I have a couple good friends working on projects directly related to wind energy and am at least aware of others. My specific field has a good amount of research dealing with shale gas and shale oil and the research is around 50/50 when it comes to the private and public sector.

The amount of interplay between the public and private research sectors is amazing and both are extremely important when it comes to innovation in scientific fields. When it comes to arguments such as public versus private sector research and the innovation that follows, people tend to just look a the large picture and not all the details, since people are not aware of the details, which completely skews our perception of what is going on.

To simplify, here is an example. Lets say to make a certain alternative energy economically viable, it is not as simple as saying that either the private or public industry created the technology. In reality, it would be more like 50 different concepts are needed. 30 will already be known but the other 20 needs research to figure out whats going on. The private industry may perform its own research on 7 of the 20 concepts, public institutions may perform its own research, from government funding, on another 7 of the 20 concepts, and a combined effort will result in researching the remaining 6 concepts.