Many journalists have reminded readers, however, that the budget proposal is not carved in stone. The New York Times’ Kenneth Chang had an excellent explanation on Tuesday of what that could mean for physicists. The group seems to have won a major coup in the 2009 proposal after massive cutbacks in the 2008 budget where announced in December. But Chang points out that the earlier budget, as well as the one in 2007, was actually supposed to increase funding for the physical sciences. But Congress changed that, and reallocated the resources to the National Institutes of Health and energy programs. So while some physicists hope that the current proposal will put their programs “back on track,” there is no certainty. Also, Chang writes:

Further complicating the process is the presidential election. There is widespread speculation that the Democratic-controlled Congress will delay passage of the budget bills in hopes that the next president will be a Democrat and more amenable to its priorities.

That sounds good, but the Democrats’ ability to guide the future of renewable fuels is still uncertain. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times carried an interesting article about the Democrat push to include a number of tax breaks for green energy producers in Congress’s multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package. Those incentives were struck down in the Senate yesterday, largely because of the still robust GOP influence on Capitol Hill, but even a self-avowed “green economist,” writing a guest column yesterday for the environmental magazine Grist, argued that the stimulus package is not the right place to promote green tech.

Still, when it comes to the future of green business (and the sustainability of reporting on such), it may not matter that Bush’s budget might not pan out, or that the stimulus package clearly hasn’t. Even though it was written before the tax breaks were struck down yesterday, the LA Times article said it best; the future is uncertain:

But the proposed benefits for green energy mark another advance for an industry that is becoming one of the darlings of Democratic-controlled Capitol Hill.

“It’s a unique moment in history for the renewable industry,” said Scott Segal, a longtime energy lobbyist in Washington. “The one thing that the Chamber of Commerce and the Sierra Club agree on is that the answer to climate change is transformative technologies.”

And the press loves transformation.

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