From the AGI monthly update:

In early February, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Ranking Member Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) released a white paper designed “to lay out some of the key questions and design elements of a national greenhouse gas program in order to facilitate discussion and the development of consensus around a specific bill.”

Rather than advocate specific viewpoints on a potential greenhouse gas reduction program, the white paper poses four key questions that Senate staff hope will induce discussion between policymakers, industries, and environmentalists.

The questions are:

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An article about India and concerns about U.S. outsourcing in this week’s Newsweek is relevant to our on going discussion of Rising Above the Gathering Storm and U.S. “competitiveness.” It is titled, “Outsourcing: Silicon Valley East Americans once feared their jobs would be shipped to India, but the backlash was overdone. Now everybody’s winning,” and can be found here. Here is an excerpt:

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Part 1 of this review focused on Chapter 1 of RAGS. This post focuses on Chapter 2, which is titled, “Why are Science and Technology Critical to America’s Prosperity in the 21st Century?” It seems obvious that science and technology are indeed important to society, and understanding why this is so would be helpful for understanding how to prioritize R&D investments in the context of many other demands on public funds, and the relative desirability different possible R&D portfolios. Unfortunately, this chapter does little more than sandwich reams of information between highly general and simplified assertions of the importance of R&D. RAGS Chapter 2 does very little to answer the question posed in its title. For details, read on.

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Given the recent attention to competitiveness by the White House and Congress, I thought that it might be useful to dig into the intellectual foundation that lies underneath. This post is the first in a series and offers a perspective on the recent NRC report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm (RAGS), all 543 pages of it, chapter-by-chapter. I start the review with this post focused on Chapter 1, titled “A Disturbing Mosaic.” We provided an overview of the executive summary of RAGS here.

The summary of my critique of the RAGS report so far is that there is a disconnect between the statement of the problem and the proposed solution. It is a truism that science and technology underpin modern society. And it is also true that the world economy has been transformed by economic globalization. But it does not clearly follow from these initial conditions that a policy focused on increasing investments in basic research in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering, and the number of scientists and engineers, will improve U.S. “competitiveness” much less counter the negative effects of globalization. While there are a suite of other policy recommendations to be found in RAGS, the focus is mostly on government funding for science and the production of PhD scientists and engineers. My interpretation of Chapter 1 in RAGS is that its arguments are largely faith-based rather than built on a foundation of policy analysis, but perhaps that is to come in future chapters. Read on for details.

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We’ve just posted a few new short FAQs, ostensibly for the media but really for anyone, on subjects that we discuss a lot around here. They are on:

Space Policy
Politicization of Science
Hurricanes and Global Warming
Drought Policy

Find them here. Your comments/suggestions are welcomed.

It’s a little stale at this point, I realize, but I wanted to give a brief report from our visit with Dr. George Keyworth, science advisor to President Reagan from 1981 -1986. Dr. Keyworth visited Boulder on Jan 31/Feb 1, the main event of which was a public lecture. I went to Dr. Keyworth’s talk and interacted with him in a few other venues throughout his visit and here are some of the take-home messages as I heard them.

In our Winter, 2006 newsletter David Goldston, Chief of Staff for the House Committee on Science, provides a perspective on the state of science policy in Congress. Goldston’s essay was invited as a response to his Democratic counter-part (recently retired), Bob Palmer, who prepared a perspective for us last summer titled, Science Policy: The Victim of Partisan Politics”.

Palmer wrote,

The Federal government is not responding to the many political challenges of the day – energy, environment, health care, global economic competition – whose resolution would greatly benefit from the wise application of S&T. When politics is overly fettered by partisanship, so is science – in the sense that its legitimate role in opening up more room for negotiations and the development of policy options is severely limited. This unfortunately is the niche that science policy occupies today.

To which Goldston responds,

In short, this hardly seems the time to lament the lack of debate over science policy in Washington or the unwillingness of Congress to air science issues. What remains to be seen is how much progress a divided Congress will make in an election year in resolving these issues. As of now, the outlook is promising.

We are appreciative of both David Goldston and Bob Plamer for not only engaging each other, but for providing us a rare look at perspectives on Congressional science policy straight from the House Science Committee. Our newsletter can be found here.

The IQ of the science policy blogosphere just increased. The periodical Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has unveiled several of the authors of its new group blog. They are ASU’s Daniel Sarewitz and OECD’s Jerry Sheehan. For those interested in science policy, they are worth a look and perhaps a link in your favorites. Here is one of Dan Sarewitz’s recent posts:

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Under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission on Atmospheric Sciences, its Tropical Meteorology Research Program Panel has just issued a statement on hurricanes and global warming (here in PDF).

The statement is significant not only because it was drafted by nine prominent experts, but because it includes in its authorship Kerry Emanuel, Greg Holland (second author of Webster et al. 2005), Ton Knutson, and Chris Landsea. Frequent readers will recognize these names as people not always in agreement. That they came together to produce a consensus statement is good for the community, and also gives a good sense on where they agree and disagree.

While the statement has enough background and language to allow anyone to selectively cherry pick from it in support of any perspective, here is the take-home message from the statement

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In today’s New York Times Andy Revkin has a follow up story on politics and NASA media policies. The story shows that we are rapidly on our way to intellectual incoherence on this issue. Consider the following:

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