The U.S. government spends about
$5 billion a year on energy research.
I decided that looking at what we spend on gasoline
might be an interesting comparison
to see how serious we are about energy research.
We take the number of cars on the road: 250 million cars.
You probably fill up every 10 days or so.
We’ve got 25 million fill-ups per day.
Now let’s say your car holds 13 gallons.
That’s 325 million gallons every day.
The price has been going down but still about $2.50.
And so we get about $813 million per day on gasoline.
Multiply by 7 and we get close to $6 billion.
The actual number is about $6.4 billion so this is very close.
But the result is pretty stunning.
We spend more in a week on gasoline here than we spend
on the entire energy research budget.