Is McCain or Obama Better for Science? Part 1

October 13, 2008

Some of you may be wondering when I’m going to get back to writing about human-animal hybrids, telepathic ray guns and other similarly weighty topics, but bear with me, because we’ve got only a few weeks left until the 2008 presidential election. This is a contest with really important, potentially world-changing issues at stake — though you wouldn’t know about it from the mainstream media, which is focused primarily upon the candidates’ personalities and campaign tactics. I’ve been particularly irked, for example, at the cable news fixation upon the  McCain campaign’s efforts to exploit the tenuous-at-best link between Obama and  onetime '60s radical William Ayers, and upon the Obama campaign’s counter-attacking  attempt to resurrect the Keating Five scandal, in which McCain was involved back in the days when he wore wider ties and had more hair. The MSM’s feigned disapproval of candidates getting down and dirty is more than a little disingenuous. In truth, the blow-dried bloviating class loves it when politicians call each other names, because angry, impassioned brouhaha makes for more dramatic television. (Just ask Judge Judy.)

How easily I digress. This week’s topic is one that you probably won’t hear about on Hardball or Hannity and Colmes. Which candidate would do more, policy-wise, to advance science?

McCain’s Plan for Fighting Global Warming

September 29, 2008

I know that everybody is worked up right now about the Wall Street mortgage crisis and what sort of leadership Barack Obama and John McCain will show regarding the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion federal bailout, the cost of which will be borne by taxpayers. While that’s a pretty tall stack of deceased presidents, in my view, it’s not the campaign issue with the biggest ultimate consequences, both in terms of economics and impact on our way of life. No, that would be the issue of global warming, and what to do about it. Look at it this way. According to a Natural Resources Defense Council study, if we don’t do something to slow the rate of climate change, by the end of this century the U.S. will be spending $950 billion annually just to cope with water shortages. That’s the equivalent of taxpayers having to bail out Wall Street every single year.

Of course, the U.S. wouldn’t be the only nation to feel the pain. In a 2006 study for the British government, economist Sir Nicholas Stern forecast that in coming decades, the effects of climate change — from flooded cities to withered cropland — could cause the global economy to shrink by an astonishing 20 percent. As Stern wrote:

The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth. Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes.