Last week the New York Times ran a brief piece on the efforts of the Kauffman Foundation to contribute to knowledge on innovation.  Short articles (and short blog posts) do leave out details for the sake of brevity, but the shortcomings of this piece could be misleading to its readership.

The piece raises a good question: how can foundations assist in the innovation challenge?  The Kauffman Foundation, focused on entrepreneurship (which should be clear from anyone who reads their website), has committed a great deal of its resources to conduct research on entrepreneurship and its relationship to innovation.

The Times piece swings at its first strike by equating the two.  They are most certainly related, but entrepreneurship is simply a part of innovation.  Similarly, the piece gets the invention/innovation distinction wrong in a misguided attempt at oversimplification.  From the article:

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A story in today’s FT shows some interesting differences across Europe and between individual European countries and the US, but overall the picture looks to be one of remarkable similarity rather than surprising differences. Here is a figure from the article:

On Friday, the probe Aditya landed on the moon and started sending images back to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).  While the United States is still the only country to have sent and returned humans from the moon, India joins a growing number of nations that have sent missions to the Moon – the U.S., Russia/the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency (ESA), China, and Japan.  The expectation is that this mission will be the first step in a series of efforts to extend and expand India’s presence outside of Earth orbit.  The lander was intended to crash on the surface, and separated from an orbiting probe, Chandrayaan 1, a few days ago.  Both NASA and the ESA have contributed research instruments to the mission.

While some may look to this event as additional incentive for the United States to get back to the moon, the commitments to the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle (and its replacement) have commanded the bulk of NASA’s financial resources.  Personally, I fail to see any political benefit in repeating what was done nearly forty years ago.  Now, China, India, and perhaps Japan may run in some kind of Asian space race, but the economic and political landscapes of space exploration suggest some kind of cooperation in more public-good oriented projects, with the competition left to providing cheaper costs to orbit and beyond.

This is rather remarkable, as reported by The Guardian last Friday, emphasis added:

The German government wants extensive exemptions for energy intensive industrial sectors for their carbon emissions caps from 2013, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief spokesman said on Friday.
“We’ve got to prevent companies from being threatened by climate protection requirements,” government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm told a news conference. Wilhelm gave no further details and said negotiations were taking place.
The Financial Times Deutschland newspaper reported on Friday that Germany wants to liberate companies from charges for EU allowances (EUAs) if they produce more than 4 kilograms of CO2 per 1 euro of turnover.
That would free companies in the steel, glassmaking, cement, paper, ceramic, and chemical sectors from paying for permits.

The transition website now lists all of the agency review teams currently in place.  These are the people who would review the relevant issues for each of the agencies under their purview and the potential appointees for positions in those agencies.  Readers are likely to be most interested in the Energy and Natural Resources; Department of Health and Human Services; and Science, Tech, Space, and Arts teams.  Each team is broken down into groups for specific agencies.  Note that these are not the groups that will be appointed to these agencies, but the people that will help prepare those appointees to be confirmed and to hit the ground running once they are confirmed.  This may explain the prevalence of lawyers and business professionals in some of these teams.  The general pattern of the transition so far has been to fill White House positions first (Secretary of State speculation aside), so I do not expect Cabinet or other agency head selections just yet.

I do note that none of the campaign science advisers noted earlier this year aren’t mentioned in the transition teams for the relevant agencies.  Presumably this will keep them in play for appointments to government positions (though I still wonder if Dr. Varmus will be willing to return to federal service after tenure as the head of NIH).

The next administration appears to be fully embracing new technology for communications, continuing the habits employed to great success during the recent campaign.  Besides the transition website, which now has several news items as well as videos on transition activities, there will be weekly YouTube addresses by President-elect Obama.  Such addresses aren’t as new as they sound, as the President has given a weekly radio address for decades.  The addition of another media form for this material is both welcome and overdue.  And if the new administration is open to new uses of technology in its activity, I think it bodes well for the administration’s future engagement with technology policy.  The next test will be who the first Chief Technology Officer of the government will be and that position’s job description.

The campaign website is still active, but there is a legal barrier between political and governmental activities that prevents it from being used directly by the White House.  However, the Democratic National Committee will likely take advantage of its information and networking capacity.  But it is possible that change.gov is the precursor of an expanded whitehouse.gov, where press releases are the least of the public information made available to web browsers.  As there has been a struggle to make federal government activity easier to observe and review – both online and in print – I hope that the expanded web activity of the Executive Branch becomes a beachhead for spreading transparency and usability of government information.

On several occasions I’ve pointed to the role of Poland in the unfolding climate debate in Europe. Poland has balked at EU proposals for decarbonizing its economy, primarily because Poland relies on domestic coal for 95% of its electricity. What we should be watching for is not if the EU comes to an agreement — it will — but how that agreement is reached. A Reuters story yesterday provided some hints as to what it will take to secure Poland’s agreement, and surprise surprise, the issues are cost and technological certainty:

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Back in July, Science Magazine published a Policy Forum advocating the consolidation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the US Geological Survey (USGS), into a single Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA). The primary rationale for the argument, formulated by several authors with considerable experience in the management of federally funded science, is that such an agency would be better equipped to deliver the “well-conceived, science-based, simultaneous responses on multiple scales, from global and national, to regional and local,” required for the “unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead.” I recommend reading the entire piece.

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).

Change will not be restricted to the White House come January.  Several committee leadership positions will change with the next Congress.  While the new faces won’t be known until early in January, at least two members of the House Science and Technology Committee will leave after the end of the 110th Congress (there may or may not be a ‘lame duck’ session between now and the end of the year to address economic recovery legislation).  Mark Udall, (D-Colorado) will join the Senate next year, meaning he will leave the chair of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee.  Nick Lampson (D-Texas), lost his re-election campaign, and will not return as chair of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee.  Kevin may have a better sense of who might fill these spots, but the current vice-chairs of these committees are Jerry McEnerny of California (Energy and Environment) and Charlie Melancon of Louisiana (Space and Aeronautics).

There will be over 40 new members of the House of Representatives and at least eight new Senators in the next Congress.  There will likely be more changes in committee leadership on both sides of the aisle.  Expect a new chair of the Senate Commerce Committee (which has jurisdiction over many science agencies), as Senator Inouye will move from that committee to chair the Appropriations Committee (Senator Byrd has opted to step down).  The shuffle for committee chairs and ranking member status will not be resolved officially until the start of the 111th Congress, but as Kevin noted in his recent post, some of these positions will be actual contests rather than moving to fill open spaces.

Last spring along with Tom Wigley and Chris Green we published an article in Nature (PDF) arguing that the IPCC had underestimated the magnitude of the mitigation challenge. Today I’d like to illustrate how the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, published yesterday, also dramatically underestimates the magnitude of the mitigation challenge.

The figure below is taken from the IEA’s publicly-available packet of key graphs (here in PDF). I have annotated it as follows to illustrate how the IEA has significantly underestimated the mitigation challenge.

A. The IEA’s first understatement involves incorrect data about the size of actual global emissions. According to the Global Carbon Project they were about 31.5 GtCO2 in 2007.

B. This curve illustrates what happens if you simply move up the IEA curve to the actual 2007 value, preserving the IEA’s average rate of growth in CO2 emissions of 1.4% per year. The choice of 1.4% per year is puzzling because, as the Global Carbon Project notes, CO2 emissions have been increasing by more than 3.0% per year in recent years. Even with a global economic slowdown, there would seem to be a real possibility that actual emissions growth will occur at a rate faster than 1.4% per year.

C. This curve shows what would happen if CO2 emissions increase at the same rate as energy demand in the IEA reference scenario, which is 1.6% per year, to 2030.

D. And this curve shows what would happen in CO2 emissions increase at a rate of 2.0% per year to 2030. Experience of the current decade shows that even faster rates of growth are possible over extended periods, so this is by no means an upper limit.

You should conclude from this exercise that it is possible, even probable, that the IEA has underestimated the mitigation challenge by a very large amount. Consequently, the IEA’s cost estimates depend upon first assuming a very low rate of growth for carbon dioxide emissions, starting from a misleading baseline. This will have the effect of making the challenge look smaller and less costly (and yet, even in the IEA scenarios the challenge is huge and expensive).

I cannot help but think that mitigation policies are poorly served by getting the scope of the challenge wrong at the outset. I suspect we are dooming them to failure.