I gave at talk at Oregon State University last week. The event was very well attended thanks to the organizers, who have put together an interesting semester-long series. Here (in PDF, 1.1 mb) are the slides. The OSU folks tell me that a video will be availale online before long. As an experiment I will occasionally post up my slides from talks on the blog. Comments welcomed!

Bil McKibben writes that he, Jim Hansen, and others are looking to get arrested next week at a demonstration against coal. I wonder if McKibben has given much thought to the following passage that he wrote (emphasis added):

Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.

And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.

McKibben writes that getting arrested has a possible downside:

It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the ’60s.

I think that a more serious downside is that people might come to realize that the willingness to trade off pulling billions of people out of poverty for shutting down coal plants. Does McKibben really think that “investors” are the only stakeholders in coal plants? Coal is both bad and good, which makes the issue really difficult and the politics very complicated. Thus, we need policies that achieve both decarbonization and pull people out of poverty at the same time.

While the National Science Foundation will wait until next week to release its guidance on the stimulus funding it is responsible for (in part because the National Science Board will meet on the subject early next week), the National Institutes of Health has released a letter (H/T DrugMonkey) outlining how it will handle its stimulus funding, at least where grants are concerned.  Acting Director Kingston indicated that his organization will focus on the following items:

(more…)

It is being reported that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will stop using some of the accounting measures that keep various federal expenses off the budget books.  That is, certain things, such as the costs for wars, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, relief of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and disaster relief, have not been counted as part of budget deficit projections by the OMB.  As far as I can tell, however, this does not extend to other accounting measures, such as the treatment of the Social Secuirty trust fund, that also mask the nature of the federal budget.

Aside from a reminder that economics is, or at least seeks to be considered as, a science, these steps demonstrate the importance of measurement in policy.  How we measure, and what measurements we use, reflect what we value (and vice versa).  This is true whether we talk about how we project our financial future, or assess innovative activity, or make determinations about scientific research.

I have a letter in today’s Science about James Killian, the first (official) presidential science adviser. Here it is:

Science 20 February 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5917, p. 1010
DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5917.1010a

The Nonscientist Science Adviser

E. Kintisch’s News Focus story (“Bending the president’s ear,” 2 January, p. 28) on the role of the science adviser to the president contains an important historical error: The first science adviser, James Killian, was not an electrical engineer. In fact, Killian was not a scientist or engineer at all. His academic training was in management and administration, and his experience included serving as the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on a number of government advisory committees (1). That the first science adviser was not a scientist is not widely appreciated, and it is not widely advertised in the science community that Killian did not earn a doctorate. Killian had been awarded an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in 1945 (2), and he was later awarded honorary degrees from Union College, Drexel Institute of Technology, and the College of William and Mary (3). That the first science adviser–often held up as the exemplar of the role–was a management expert should not be overlooked (1).

Roger A. Pielke
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado/CIRES
Boulder, CO 80309, USA. E-mail: pielke@colorado.edu

References

1. R. Pielke Jr., R. Klein, Minerva 47, 5 (2009).
2. Anonymous, The Tech 65, 4 (13 July 1945).
3. Anonymous, The Tech 77, 1 (26 April 1957).

Under the Bush Administration, critics complained (quite rightly) that the decision to move the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) out of the Old Executuve Office Building next to the White House and down the street indicated that the president saw little value in OSTP. I asked John Marburger (Bush’s science advisor) about this in a public interview in 2005, and here is his response:

You know, we were in the old Executive Office Building in the wing that faced 17th Street. It’s the only wing of the White House complex that faced an open street. The whole wing was evacuated because they were concerned about truck bombs on 17th Street, and it is currently being renovated. The whole thing is empty right now.

We were moved out into very excellent quarters about a block and a half away, and I must say they were much better quarters than the old Executive Office Building. I hate the old Executive Office Building because it’s all cut up into pieces, and in an organization like ours, we work in teams on inter- disciplinary problems and issues that come up, and it’s important for our people to be able to interact easily. It is very difficult for team work among different offices within the Executive Office Building the way the space is cut up. So, we were moved temporarily into an office building, a non-federal office building, for a couple of years while space was made available for us in the new Executive Office Building, which is right up 17th Street across the street from the White House. That’s the building where some of my predecessors were. I think Jay Keyworth had his offices there through the Reagan era. So, it has been a traditional home for OSTP, and I always thought that would have no bearing. I don’t think that where we are makes much difference. We are not, after all, in a day-to-day support mode for the President. The President needs people close to him who will support his activities during the day every day as he is challenged. That’s not — science is not a necessary part of that on a day-to-day basis. The time scale of science advice is much longer than that, and we tend to work out science issues with the other staff of people and the Agencies long before they every get to the President.

In this week’s Nature Jeff Tollefson has a profile of John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. In it Tollefson notes that Holdren has:

. . . negotiated workspace in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House.

This phrasing does not appear to suggest that Obama has moved OSTP back to the old Executive Office Building. Does it mean that there is an office or cubicle available for Holdren? Does it mean that science has be returned to its proper place?

Any thoughts on where OSTP actually is and the implications of its location?

Last week a defunct Russian satellite collided with an Iridium telecommunications satellite.  While this is supposedly the first known (or at least publicized) collision between two intact satellites, the crash has raised concerns over the thousands of objects orbiting the Earth.  As the article linked to indicates, there is monitoring of so-called space ‘junk’, but with an increase in spacefaring nations, and ultimately private entities moving from suborbital to orbital trips, the amount of ‘junk’ will get to a point where collisions will no longer be so rare.  At that point, will monitoring be sufficient?  I don’t know.  But I do think it’s an issue worth discussing in appropriate fora.

Politico provides a small window into the salaries found in big time academia. An excerpt:

At least three incoming Obamademics – Cecilia Rouse, nominated for a spot on Council of Economic Advisers; Elena Kagan, Obama’s solicitor general-designate; and Energy Secretary Steven Chu – got reduced or subsidized mortgages through their schools (Princeton, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, respectively).

All three can continue receiving their mortgage deals if they take leaves of absence from their schools – an option that both Rouse, who earned $300,000 last year as a Princeton economics professor, and Kagan, who pulled in $437,000 as dean of the Harvard Law School, indicated they will do for at least two years.

Chu doesn’t say whether he’ll take a leave, but he reported that upon resignation, “all benefits will end, including the car allowance, reduced mortgage rate and university club membership” and that he’ll have six months to repay the mortgage.

Chu, a Nobel prize-winning Berkeley physics professor who was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, earned $412,000 last year (plus another $34,000 this year, after he was tapped to be energy secretary). But he also pulled in nearly $80,000 from board, judging and lecture fees, including a $20,000 speech in Hong Kong in late December. . .

Jane Lubchenco, Obama’s choice to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reported receiving $150,000 for winning the 2008 Zayed International Prize for the Environment and $235,000 last year as a professor of zoology at Oregon State University.

But, perhaps the most colorful income reported by an incoming Obamademic appeared on the report of John Holdren, Obama’s choice to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Holdren – who earned $93,000 as an environmental policy professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and $174,000 as director of the environmental group the Woods Hole Research Center – picked up another $250 from an April appearance on CBS’s “The Late Show with David Letterman,” on which he advocated fast action to address climate change.

Today’s FT has a very interesting letter in response to the Gore/Moon op-ed of a few days ago. Here is what it says:

Sir, Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore insist that “growing green” become the new “mantra” for government spending (“Green growth is essential to any stimulus”, February 17). They are right that we should eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies, but wrong on three grounds that subsidies for technologies they prefer should follow. It would be far better to eliminate government subsidies for politically favoured technologies generally.

First, to truly be “pro-poor”, we must address the needs of the 884m who lack safe drinking water and the 1.6m who, according to World Health Organisation estimates, die annually from indoor air pollution caused by low-tech burning of sustainable fuels such as dung. A nice, modern coal-fired power plant could run water treatment facilities and eliminate the indoor air pollution for much of the world’s poor. Solar panels can’t yet. Waiting for new technologies that are years from availability means millions of the world’s poorest will fall ill and die. No subsidies for any technology, but put resources into solutions that work for the poor today, not in 20 years.

Second, the green jobs literature focuses almost entirely on boosting low labour productivity employment. Instead of defining a job as “green” because it uses a lot of labour, we should look at what that labour produces. Efficient use of all resources, including labour, generates the wealth that helps the poor become less poor. What we need is high labour productivity jobs that generate enough wealth to pay decent wages, not more subsistence level work that requires subsidies.

Finally, before we launch any mass greening of the economy, a consensus must be reached on what it means to be green. As part of a forthcoming study of the green jobs literature, my co-authors and I examined the definition of “green” used in various recent green jobs proposals and found that it means little beyond “technologies the authors like”. This is particularly clear with respect to nuclear power. Many studies dismiss it entirely as insufficiently green; others focus on its lack of carbon emissions and embrace at least some uses. The important point is that what politicians like Mr Gore prefer is irrelevant to meeting people’s needs – what actually works is a better test of which technologies deserve investment.

It’s easy to chant “grow green”; it’s much harder to come up with concrete steps to reduce environmental footprints – as demonstrated by Mr Gore’s massive personal carbon footprint from his house, house boat, idling limousines outside speeches and use of private jets.

Andrew P. Morriss
H. Ross & Helen Workman Professor of Law and Business
Professor, Institute for Government and Public Affairs
University of Illinois,
Champaign, IL, US

Sheila Jasanoff, a leading scholar of science and society, has an interesting article in Seed magazine. She argues that science and democracy share the same underlying values:

. . . the very virtues that make democracy work are also those that make science work: a commitment to reason and transparency, an openness to critical scrutiny, a skepticism toward claims that too neatly support reigning values, a willingness to listen to countervailing opinions, a readiness to admit uncertainty and ignorance, and a respect for evidence gathered according to the sanctioned best practices of the moment.

At one level I see her point, that these are all virtues we should strive for both in our pursuit of knowledge and our political institutions. Yet, at the same time, in the actual practice of both science and politics the achievement of these virtues falls well short of these lofty ideals, even in the aftermath of the Bush Administration.

Here are a few interesting passages from her piece that raise some interesting questions about the current practical application of the “common virtues” underlying science and democracy:

The Second Enlightenment must be the enlightenment of modesty. All through the 20th century, grand attempts to remake nations and societies failed. Today, as this nation heeds its president’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America,” it would do well to reflect on those modest virtues that underlie the long-term successes of both science and democracy. These are not the programmatic ambitions of revolution or of wholesale system redesign, but rather the skeptical, questioning virtues of an experimental turn of mind: the acceptance that truth is provisional, that questioning of experts should be encouraged, that steps forward may need corrective steps back, and that understanding history is the surest foundation for progress.

Is it really the case that skepticism and the questioning of experts is to be celebrated? That wholesale system design is to be greeted with caution? That truth is provisional? Jasanoff rightly says that such claims will be vigorously challenged.

She also writes:

In restoring respect for science within government agencies, the new administration should recognize that our understanding of the relations between knowledge and power have changed fundamentally over the past 50 years. A new branch of research — science and technology studies (STS) — has sprung up that takes the interplay of science, technology, and society as its object of investigation. STS scholarship suggests that science’s role in “speaking truth to power” is much more complicated than was once thought. The old formulation suggests both the accessibility of an unambiguous truth and a clean separation between knowledge and power that are radically at odds with the ways in which knowledge actually develops in disputed policy contexts. Rather than claiming the rarely attainable high ground of truth, scientific advice should own up to uncertainty and ignorance, exercise ethical as well as epistemic judgment, and ensure as far as possible that society’s needs drive advances in knowledge instead of science presuming to lead society.

Again, lofty ideals, but far from being achieved in practice, even under the new Administration.