The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.  Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions.  If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public.  To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking.  The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.

For many, this is not just about opening the door to a particular kind of medical research; they view it as a fundamental change in the role played by science in policy.

This seems to emerge in the media coverage of the event. There is considerable discrepancy between the actual contents of the memo, and what the media (and those they interview) have been saying about it. For example, on NPR:

DeGette says that during the Bush administration, scientific policy was often dictated by things other than scientific evidence.

Well, yes, of course it was. As is often said on this blog, policy is never dictated by science, and Obama’s memo says nothing that would suggest otherwise. It is very much focused on process and openness, but makes no statements about how science should influence decision making.

The Washington Post quotes Harold Varmus (former NIH director, Nobel laureate, and Obama advisor):

Today’s executive order “is consistent with the president’s determination to use sound scientific practice . . . instead of dogma in developing federal policy”

This suggests that you can somehow use science instead of values to develop policy. But Obama’s stem cell decision is no less value driven than was George Bush’s. Regardless of your position, to come to a conclusion on the ethics of stem cell research you must wrestle with difficult issues such as the acceptability of destroying human embryos. Obama’s words and actions suggest nothing like the “determination” Varmus describes.

It’s important to remember that this event represents a political success — a shift away from one set of values, and toward another (though of course, it is not so black and white). It is not, by any means, a shift from politics toward science. Even if that were possible, it’s hard to see why it would be desirable.

Besides discussing the challenges and wisdom behind enabling the government with Web 2.0 technologies (the huge campaign e-mail list must be used by an outside entity, how much staff time can be spared to read thousands of comments, how do you archive all of this, etc.), the article also covers the patchwork nature of government websites and the few successful efforts to incorporate Web 2.0 technology (not happy with the No Fly List?  Go to the Transportation Security Administration’s blog and let them know).  If you’ve ever wondered why certain things aren’t happening with government and the Internet, this article is a good starting point.

Last week, Science printed a response to that article, which, to our disappointment, was not the one submitted by Roger Pielke, Dan Sarewitz, Lisa Dilling, and me. So, after consulting with the original authors, we have decided to use Prometheus as a venue for continuing this discussion. I will include our unpublished letter below, and hope that Jim Baker will post their response in the comments, and we can go from there.

The short version of our response is that: 1.) there is no reason to think that the proposed consolidation would be good for science, and 2.) whether or not consolidation turns out to be good for science is irrelevant to the question of how best to orient scientific research so that it helps to address larger societal problems.

Here is our letter:

In a July 4 Policy Forum (1), a formidable group of experts on environmental research policy proposes the creation of an Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA) by combining NOAA and USGS.

We agree that the U.S. faces “unprecedented environmental and economic challenges” at the same time as the environmental sciences have experienced declining national investments and increasing politicization.  But reducing the number of key environmental science agencies from six to five will neither alleviate the challenges of inter-agency coordination, nor create a comprehensive research capacity. Moreover, the politics of ripping NOAA and the USGS out of their home departments (Commerce and Interior) would certainly lead to bruising political battles with unpredictable outcomes.  In a time of budget constraint, consolidation could make the problem worse for science by creating more conspicuous targets for political manipulation and budget cutting (2, 3).

Even more troubling is the “science push” approach that the authors advocate. ESSA’s proposed design puts data acquisition and basic science at the core of efforts to develop decision-relevant information that is then delivered to the outside world.  Decades of experience and scholarship, including a recent NRC assessment of the Nation’s climate science enterprise (4), shows that this approach is good at advancing basic knowledge but largely ineffective at providing useful knowledge for decision makers.

The most successful environmental science programs—including those in the USGS and NOAA—have long ago moved away from a simple linear approach (“do the science, then communicate it”) to embrace an integrated model where research and engagement are tightly linked from the outset, so that research agendas and products are responsive to the needs and capabilities of information users, and users in turn know what they can expect from scientists (5-10).  What makes them successful is not the breadth of their research portfolios, but their approach to research and problem solving. A truly innovative approach to improving society’s capacity to respond to environmental challenges would focus investments on leveraging the experience and resources of agency programs with ongoing decision support and service capacity, such as hazards and water monitoring programs at USGS, and the Coastal Services Center and National Integrated Drought Information Systems at NOAA.  Absent such innovation, bureaucratic reshuffling is unlikely to improve the value of science in addressing society’s most urgent challenges.

1.    M. Schaefer et al., Science 321, 44 (July 4, 2008, 2008).
2.    D. Sarewitz, Issues in Science & Technology 23, 31 (Summer, 2007).
3.    D. Goldston, Nature 451,  (2008).
4.    NRC, “Evaluating Progress of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program:  Methods and Preliminary Results”  (National Academies Press, 2007).
5.    D. W. Cash, J. C. Borck, A. G. Patt, Science Technology Human Values 31, 465 (July 1, 2006, 2006).
6.    H. Meinke et al., Climate Research 33, 101 (2006).
7.    D. Sarewitz, R. A. Pielke, Environmental Science & Policy 10, 5 (2007).
8.    K. Jacobs, G. Garfin, M. Lenart, Environment 47, 6 (2005).
9.    S. Agrawala, K. Broad, D. H. Guston, Science Technology Human Values 26, 454 (October 1, 2001, 2001).
10.    D. Cash et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100, 8086 (2003).

Colorado’s best-known progressive donors are advancing their political and ideological agenda through a web of advocacy and nonprofit groups, many of which claim nonpartisanship and receive tax exemptions.

The 37 organizations that collectively receive millions at the direction of the Colorado Democracy Alliance (CoDA) serve unique purposes in the progressive power brokers’ toolbox.

They build voting blocs, provide policy research, shape media communications, train progressive leaders or encourage civic engagement, according to the alliance’s organizing documents.

She continues in a second article:

The model, which appears to legally skirt federal regulations that prevent coordination between candidate campaigns and issue groups, has proved so successful at turning a red state blue that it could cause nationwide change as 18 other states prepare to adopt it.

While Ms. Fender might not like the outcome, what is wrong with a nonprofit engaging in politics?

Yes, there are a number of laws that restrict nonprofit behavior in politics. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit — the most restrictive tax designation – cannot support specific candidates for office, contribute to political campaigns, or tell its members how to vote.

However, 501(c)(3) organizations can engage in issue advocacy, sponsor talk by candidates, and attempt to persuade candidates to adopt the organization’s position. Certainly, these are political activities!

]]> http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?feed=rss2&p=4629 0 http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=4613 http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=4613#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2008 05:40:50 +0000 admin http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=4613 Besides demonstrating the continuing ineptitude of Congress and its leadership, the bailout – or what’s not in it – is further evidence of the impotence of science and technology funding advocates.  Part of the reason the second rescue package garnered sufficient votes is the spending piggybacked onto the original plan.  You may have already heard of the various tax credits and incentives added to the bill, including the R & D and alternative energy provisions I mentioned earlier this week. Taxpayers for Common Sense have analyzed the bill and found that the Senate added $110 billion to the $700 billion figure we’re all very familiar with by now.  None of that money will go toward fully funding the science agencies targeted by the America COMPETES Act.  Between the bailout and the continuing resolution that will fund the first half of the current fiscal year, science and technology research funding continues to lose.

These losses suggest to me that the one ’success’ research communities have had since the doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget – the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report – is actually a failure.  That research and policy communities still perceive it a success – criticism aside – compounds the failure.  It’s as though the science and technology advocacy communities are classical physicists in an Einsteinian universe.  The world does not correspond with their perceptions of it, and they don’t recognize it, much less know what to do about it.

Contrary to the rhetoric and community attention connected to Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the policy recommendations in the document have effectively been ignored.  Sure, legislation has been passed, the issues raised in the document have been discussed, but the money hasn’t arrived.  To radically paraphrase the old philosophical cliché, if a policy document does not lead to implemented policy, did it make a difference?  You know my answer – tell me why I’m wrong.

Last week I urged that research communities seriously consider alternative sources of funding, because it seems clear that the federal government will not raise their allowances any time soon.  It also seems that they need to treat their policy recommendations different than their other research output.  It’s not enough to publish and publicize.  That will do for establishing and maintaining academic credentials, tenure and reputation.  But to have policy relevance requires something different – an ability to take knowledge and recommendations and convert them into action.

This professional incompetence is both not surprising and a bad sign for any programs depending on consistent funding – whether that funding is constant or promised with a constant rate of growth.  I think research communities need to seriously consider finding alternative sources of funding.  Independent of the twin fiscal drains of war and bailouts (the auto industry got $25 billion today), federal funding can no longer be counted on, even at the more meager levels.  The biomedical community completely failed to manage its wealth of riches when the NIH budget was doubled, and they have too many students and too many researchers landing hard.  I am concerned that all research communities in this country will be neither ready nor able to handle a decrease in resources.  We’ve just been on the gravy train too long to see it crashing into the painted hole in the rock.

I’m afraid I can’t describe this in stark enough terms for people to act accordingly.  If you thought science and technology were ignored before, get ready for fiscal apathy.  If you think the expected crunch of the mid-90s following the Cold War was successfully avoided, consider the possibility that it was only delayed 15 years.  To borrow climate science language – adaptation strategies are needed now that mitigation appears to be unsuccessful.

Compared with pulp fiction or even the latest sleaze in the National Enquirer, books that are written about the operational process of government bureaucracies often make a strong case for the virtue of narcolepsy.

What I mean to say is show me a dry scientific treatise on the topic of administering Western public land management agencies, and I’ll find you readers who would rather be waterboarded than crack open the pages.

Despite its unflashy title, Ensuring Greater Yellowstone’s Future: Choices for Leaders and Citizens by Susan Clark, founder of the Jackson-based Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative and adjunct professor of environmental policy at Yale University, is actually a barn burner.

It’s one of the best books ever written about the major jurisdictional fiefdoms the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers and fish and game departments from three states – that collectively oversee the management of more than 18 million public acres in this famous corner of the American West…

A few of Clark’s conclusions:

• Many of our current leaders in Greater Yellowstone are rich in experience but poor in theory – about both the challenges they and society face and the responses needed.

• Business as usual in natural-resource policy at both the national and local level is not sustainable, especially when it advances only short-term interests.

• Public land managers, scientists, conservationists and business leaders need to be given opportunities to think boldly when solving problems without being immediately punished or chastised…

This book should be required reading for politicians, all civil servants assigned to this region and citizens who want their voices heard. Like the controversy over snowmobiling in Yellowstone, natural resource decisions in this ecosystem are like the movie Groundhog Day. Ensuring Greater Yellowstone’s Future charts a different direction and shows that we desperately need leaders who are not afraid of their own shadows.

The full review can be found here.

According to this dataset, the number of American’s that belong to an environmental organization correlates with presidential party affiliation; claimed membership is approximately 50% greater during a Republican presidency.

I created the figure by harvesting polling data from six different polls between 1978 and 2005. All six polls roughly ask the same question: do you belong to an environmental organization? The blue points represent the percentage of respondents answering in the affirmative. The percentage is found on the left axis. I was curious how these percentages translated into actual numbers of American citizens. To do this, I multiplied the percentage of affirmative respondents by the US Census’ estimate for each year, which is illustrated by the red points. The number of Americans is found on the right axis.

I am fully aware of the challenges of comparing the results of different surveys. This figure is a back of the envelope calculation to help triangulate relevant trends for my research. While the results are not definitive they certainly are suggestive.

For those interested, the exact polling questions are below:

1978: Do you belong to any national environment organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Audubon Society or others like these? (Survey by Resources for the Future)

1982: Do you belong to any of the following types of community organizations?…Environmental groups. (Survey by Continental Group)

1990: Please look carefully at the following list of voluntary organizations and activities and say which, if any, do you belong to?…Conservation, the environment, ecology (Gallup Organization)

1996: We would like to know something about the groups or organizations to which you currently belong. Here is a list of various kinds of organizations. For each type, please tell me whether you belong to any club or organization that fits into that category. Just call off the number of each type you belong to… environmental clubs or organizations (Post-Modernity Project at the University of Virginia)

2000: There are many different kinds of environmental organizations, including large national and international organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, as well as smaller, local organizations. Do you, yourself, belong to any large national or international environmental organizations? (Gallup organization)

2005: There are many different kinds of environmental organizations, including large national and international organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, as well as smaller, local organizations. Do you, yourself, belong to any large national or international environmental organizations? (Gallup organization)

What happens when the scientific community’s responsibility to society conflicts with its professional self interest? In the case of research related to climate change the answer is clear: Self interest trumps responsibility.

Our argument was that the scientific community sought to take care of its own interests first while “the needs and capabilities of decisionmakers who must deal with climate change have played little part in guiding research priorities.”

If you need any evidence that little has changed in the five years since we wrote that article, have a look at this story by Andy Revkin in today’s New York Times. The article discusses the termination of the Center for Capacity Building at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s largest government-supported atmospheric (and related) sciences research lab.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for work on the causes and consequences of climate change, has shut down a program focused on strengthening poor countries’ ability to forecast and withstand droughts, floods and other climate-related hazards.

The move, which center officials say resulted from the shrinking of federal science budgets, is being denounced by many experts on environmental risk, who say such research is more crucial than ever in a world with rising populations exposed to climate threats.

In e-mail exchanges, these experts said the eliminated program, the Center for Capacity Building, was unique in its blend of research and training in struggling countries.

The Center for Capacity Building (still online at ccb.ucar.edu) was created in 2004. It built on decades of work by its director, Michael Glantz, a political scientist who has focused on the societal effects of natural climate extremes and any shifts related to accumulating greenhouse gases.

What were the budget implications of this Center?

Altogether, the eliminated program had an annual budget of about $500,000. The budget for the entire atmospheric research center is $120 million.

According to data from the NSF (p. 384 of this PDF), the primary funder of NCAR, the NSF contribution to the NCAR budget for FY2009 is expected to grow by 9.5%, and the lab’s budget is projected to grow by about $13 million over the next decade. NSF explains (emphasis added):

In FY 2009, GEO support for NCAR will increase by $9.0 million, to a total of $95.42 million to: accelerate efforts in provide robust, accessible, andinnovative information services and tools to the community; enhance NCAR’s ability to provide to researchers world-class ground, airborne, and space-borne observational facilities and services; increase our understanding of societal resilience to weather, climate, and other atmospheric hazards; and increase efforts to cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce.

So why did NSF have to cut a large part of its commitment to the social sciences? Cliff Jacobs, NSF program officer responsible for NCAR, explained the decision as follows:

Clifford A. Jacobs, the National Science Foundation’s section head for the atmospheric research center and related programs, said the decision did not mean that the center was interested only in basic physical climate science.

“This came as a very, very difficult decision,” Dr. Jacobs said. “You have to protect your core activities, but as budgets keep shrinking you have to redefine your core.”

In this case “shrinking” must mean “not growing as fast as we would like” since the budget has obviously not been decreasing in size. Let this be a reminder that as we often enjoy discussing the politics of the left and the right, some of the the most damaging politics are found in the battle among disciplines within academia. Unfortunately, in this case the collateral damage extends far beyond academia:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Dr. Glantz said that he was let go Monday and that three other researchers were also losing their jobs. One, Tsegay Wolde-Georgis, left a similar program at Columbia University less than a year ago to work with Dr. Glantz. Dr. Wolde-Georgis’s focus is bolstering the ability of African nations to anticipate and withstand drought and other climate shocks.

I look forward to the day when serving the needs of decision makers becomes part of the “core” in the leading institutions of the atmospheric sciences.

“Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.”

I won’t go into the various arguments for and against this idea, but I think it’s worth contrasting the title of this effort — “Science Debate 2008” – with what is actually being proposed in the above quotation. The issues listed span a political and cultural landscape of which science occupies only a very small piece. On the other hand, there are far more issues in which science plays a part (e.g. space, transportation, agriculture, …) that somehow did not make the cut. Why these issues in this particular debate? What is the goal of holding this debate?

Despite the title of this movement, what is advocated here is not a “science debate,” and as Goldston pointed out in Nature, applying such a name to it potentially does a great disservice to whatever discourse might emerge. One need only look at Kennedy’s suggested questions in Science to see why this is true. Some of these questions are about politics and values, others are about budgetary aspects of science policy, and still others are about criteria of scientific merit. While a sitting president could take a position on any of these example questions, few of them are high profile enough to reach that status.

Others are misleadingly framed to begin with. For example, no single person or entity determines the balance between “major-program project research and investigator-initiated basic research grants” and it is doubtful that it would be possible (let alone desirable) to alter this reality. (And I’ll leave aside the question of whether anyone at all in the general public would find this question interesting.)

It seems that the agenda of this movement is to raise the profile of a very specific set of issues. Why these issues should represented as inherently “scientific” is mystery to me. What should be clarified is the reasoning behind selecting these issues, and the overall goals of the proposed debate. Maybe then the supporters could make some progress in dealing with the issues raised by Goldston and others, and perhaps even make headway toward a truly useful event.