I remember visiting Neal when he was Science Adviser to the President. His office was in the West Wing. Marburger's [Dr. John Marburger, Current Science Adviser to the President] office is 3 or 4 blocks away in an unmarked building, and that seems to me to be symbolic.
- Dr. Rick Smalley, Rice University
I attended a discussion panel today that was led by Drs. Rick Smalley and Neal Lane, two of the signers of the report released recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administrations Misuse of Science. The report is cosigned by a number of prominent scientists, including many Nobel laureates, a group which includes Dr. Smalley. Smalley won the Noble prize in chemistry in 1996 for the discovery and characterization of C60, Buckminsterfullerene, more commonly known as Bucky Balls. He is curently professor of chemistry and a professor of physics at Rice University. Dr. Neal Lane was President Clinton's Science Adviser from 1998 to 2001, and he is currently a University Professor at Rice and a Senior Fellow at Rice's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Drs. Smalley and Lane talked for two hours today about the reasons why they signed the report and their thoughts about the report and about the current administration's attitude toward science. There is a link to the report in pdf form here and you can view prominent signatories of the report here. You can see Dr. Marburger's rebuttal of the report here, and you can read an editorial critcizing the UCS report for indulging in partisanship which is written by the editors of the website Spinsanity and published in the Philadelphia Inquirer here (click on the title to read the full article; you will need to do a free registration with the Philadelphia Inquirer). More information on Dr. Smalley can be found here and more information on Dr. Lane can be found here.
The rest of my post today will consist of a summary of the discussion by Drs. Smalley and Lane and some of my impressions of that discussion. The subject is near and dear to my heart. I am several months away from receiving my Ph.D. in physics, and I hope to someday be involved in the field of science policy in the government. This subject, the current Bush administration and its stance towards science, is a complicated topic, and Dr. Marburger makes some persuasive points in his rebuttal, so I plan to return in tomorrow's post to this topic- the UCS report and the reactions to it. Please note that all of the quotes in today's post are from my notes on the discussion and may not be accurate. I do not believe that a transcript is yet available. So please do not view the quotes in this post as an accurate record of what was said, they are only the best I could do in deciphering my chicken scratch.
The discussion of the content of the report centered primarily on climate change. Both Smalley and Lane pointed out that the research for the report was done by a number of scientists, and neither one of them were experts on any one topic. But they were clearly comfortable in backing up the report's criticism of the Bush administration's public views on climate change. According to the report, "Since taking office, the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the public's understanding of the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are making a discernible contribution to global warming." Smalley suggested looking up the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which can be found here, as an exemplary example of scientists getting together to draw conclusions which can be used to make good public policy. According to the UCS report, the Bush administration continues to question the findings of the IPCC.
One thing that Lane was uncomfortable with in the UCS report was the criticism of Richard Russell, associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who is responisible for the agency's technology portfolio. Russell does not have a Ph.D., only a bachelor's degree in biology, and he has no graduate or professional training whatsoever, and no experience in a technology-related industry. Russell was appointed to the post by John Marsburger, and Marsburger has claimed that Russell is indeed qualified for the post and that there was no political motivation in the appoitment. Lane says that he trusts Marsburger's assertion, and Dr. Lane claimed that he unsuccessfully lobbied UCS to remove the criticisms of Richard Russell from the report.
I have heard several talks by Neal Lane, and one of the things that has struck me from those talks is how difficult it is to change policy when faced with the overwhelming weight of the bureaucracy in Washington. It would almost be amusing, if it wasn't so sad, that aggressive action against Al Quaeda may have taken place in the spring or summer of 2001 if Richard Clarke could just have gotten Condoleezza Rice to call a meeting. So much of getting things done in Washington depends on knowing the right people and having access to those people, which is why it was such a big deal when Clarke's counterterrorism coordinator position got demoted from a Cabinet-level position when Bush took office. No longer did Clarke have direct access to the President. Much the same is true of science. If the President doesn't want to consider scientific findings when making policy decisions, he doesn't have to take any antagonistic actions towards the findings, simple inaction will suffice. If scientists can't meet with the President or his Cabinet, then what they say will have little impact on the administration's decisions. And so that is why Dr. Smalley finds it worrisome that the Science Adviser's office is now 3 blocks away from the White House.
Even in administrations sympathetic to science, there is still an uphill battle to get the kinds of policies enacted that scientists hope for. One of the biggest hurdles is that thing that always comes into play with politics- money. It's difficult to get money for science. Among the Capitol Hill folks, the Senate has no science committee whatsoever, and while the House does have a science committee, it has no appopriation ability. So, the money for scientific endeavors is divied up among thirteen different appropriations committees, none of which is principally concerned with science. Funding for science, then, is almost never of question of funding for space exploration versus funding for cancer research versus funding for studies of alternative energy sources. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is in the same appropriations committee as veterans affairs, so as Lane described it, "we end up in the ridiculous situation that a good funding year for NSF means a bad funding year for the veterans, and a good funding year for the veterans means a bad funding year for NSF." The National Institute of Health is funded by the same committee that funds the Department of Labor.
It doesn't take a willful antagonism towards science by the government to cause problems, it merely takes a willful neglect. Which is why, according to Lane and Smalley, they did not want this report to be viewed as a critism of the policies of the Bush administration, they wanted the report to be viewed as a criticism of the neglect, misuse and misrepresentation of science in enacting public policy. Smalley opened the discussion by saying, "I don't know who I want to win the next election. I didn't do any work for the Clinton administration, but I have done some work for the Bush administration... I just wanted to bring this issue up for discussion." Later on, Smalley said, "Of course this report is about politics. I signed it because I wanted to see a change take place in the way politics are done in the administration." Like I said at the beginning, it can be confusing. But the point was, in my mind, that there is a place for science in politics, and not just that, there needs to be a place for science in politics, and that place is in the policies where scientific data and scientific findings can dictate the best course to take. So, while science may not have much to say about steel tariffs (actually, there's bound to be economics research on steel tariffs, but anyway), it has a lot to say about global warming.
The most informative part of the discussion for me was the talk about the subtle ways that government and science interact. According to Lane, the frustration of many long-time EPA scientists over the administration's stance on issues like global warming and stricter standards on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, has caused a lot of those people to leave the agency. Lane said that the exodus will cause "lasting damage, that will be very hard to reverse." He worried that "most students who get their Ph.D. do not consider working for the EPA to be their first choice for a career. There will not be enough scientists available to replace all those who are leaving. And the people coming in who do replace them will probably be underqualified for the positions they are filling." Another example of the subtle influences government can have on science was given by Smalley. After President Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to devote $1.2 billion towards the development of hydrogen-powered automobiles, Smalley says, "Suddenly the rhetoric on energy policy opened up. Government scientists were given a new freedom, and discussions about the real problems involving energy were taking place. The most interesting discussions were not even about hydrogen-fueled cars, but were rather about where we would get the energy to charge the hydrogen cells [Note: Hydrogen is what is known as a secondary energy source, which means that some other (primary) energy source must be used to power up a hydrogen battery]."
What will come of this report? Smalley stated that sooner or later the country and the government must reckon with science. "Regardless of whether any issues raised by the UCS report turn out to be true, the question that must be dealt with is whether the truth is being acknowledged in policy decisions."
And speaking of the truth, and of obvious scientific truths, let me end with a non-sequitar, and return again to global warming. This is Dr. Lane's very common-sense view on the issue of global warming, and his take on how it this issue could and should be presented to and understood by politicians: "Global warming science is straightforward in that we know climate change will eventually contribute to major weather catastrophes. It's just simple physics that the more heat that is trapped in the atmosphere, the more energy is available for weather events. If flooding is right now a problem in Houston and the Gulf Coast, it will be an even worse problem when global warming changes start to have a major effect... I feel that many common citizens who worry about global warming do so because they have been the victims of a weather disaster- a flood, a hurricane, a tornado. These may not have been caused by global warming, but we know if we let things go on as they are, that there will be these kinds of events, more of these catastrophes, because of global warming. This is how politicians should understand the issue and what should persuade them to take action."
