A sick graph

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Dan Hahn.
Categories: Solar Trends.

These figures are in millions. The source for energy R&D expenditures is from the National Council for Science and the Environment. Take a look here.

Though the war in Iraq now costs about $120B a year, two authors (one a Nobel prize winner) estimates the total cost of this war exceeds 2 Trillion Dollars.

“Accrued liabilities for U.S. federal employees’ and veterans’ benefits now total $4.5 trillion. Indeed, our debt for veterans’ health and disability payments has risen by $228 billion in the past year alone…The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the interest payments on the money borrowed to finance the Iraq war will total $264 billion to $308 billion.”

That $2,000,000,000,000? Well, that amount of money could’ve built solar thermal plants here that would have provided energy for 2/3rds of our nation’s energy demand.

Admittedly, that graph doesn’t look all that pretty (In more ways than one). The main problem I had was taking the excel file and transferring the image into a viewable web format. If anyone has an ideas on how maintain the scale of the image without deterioration, please email me! I’ll happily send along the excel image if you’d be willing to create a cleaner GIF or JPG.