Over in the Web Briefing, there’s a WaPo piece by Bill Gates and Chad Holliday on alternative energy:

This country runs on innovation. The American success story — from Ben Franklin’s bifocals to Thomas Edison’s light bulb to Henry Ford’s assembly line to today’s advanced microprocessors — is all about inventing our future. The companies we ran, Microsoft and DuPont, were successful because they invested deeply in new technologies and new ideas.
But our country is neglecting a field central to our national prospect and security: energy. Although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 percent of their revenue on research and development each year, U.S. companies’ spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 percent of revenue over the past 15 years.
And despite talk about the need for “21st-century” energy sources, federal spending on clean energy research — less than $3 billion — is also relatively small. Compare that with roughly $30 billion that the U.S. government annually spends on health research and $80 billion on defense research and development.
As many have noted, an energy future built on yesterday’s technology threatens to leave people exposed to price shocks (hurting Americans and devastating the world’s poor) and would exacerbate our national security problems and increase our trade deficit, given our dependence on costly foreign oil. The science is also clear that without significant efforts to tackle the climate issue, the effects of warming will grow, undermining agriculture, making droughts and floods more common and more severe, and eventually destroying ecosystems.

The rest here.