Is McCain or Obama Better for Science? Part 2

October 20, 2008

For those of you who weren’t sufficiently entertained by the presidential debates, here’s something you might appreciate more.

OK, back to our featured question: Which presidential candidate would do more to advance science and technological development? In last week’s blog, we examined GOP nominee Sen. John McCain’s positions. This week, we look at those of the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. (And while this may stamp me as a media enabler of the political status quo, I’m not going to examine the positions of third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, in part because they haven’t taken any policy positions on science and technology.)

Obama’s campaign Web site has a short section on his science and technology policy positions. In it, he promises to avoid the mistakes of the Bush administration, which, as we noted last week, actively tried to censor government scientists when their research contradicted the president's political positions, and made politically motivated appointments to important scientific advisory committees. Instead, Obama says that

Obama’s Plan to Fight Global Warming

October 06, 2008

According to the transcript of the first presidential debate, GOP candidate John McCain was the only one to actually mention global warming as an issue — but he did so only in passing, as an additional justification for his plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants, which we discussed in last week’s blog. As McCain explained,

Nuclear power is not only important as far as eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, but it's also responsibility as far as climate change is concerned and the issue I have been involved in for many, many years and I'm proud of the work of the work that I've done there along with President Clinton.

I have to point out that while nuclear power may make sense as a measure to combat global warming, the argument that it will free us from dependence upon foreign oil is pretty much nonsensical.  According to U.S. Department of Energy data, the U.S. gets only about 50 million megawatt-hours of electricity from burning petroleum — a minuscule amount compared to the more than 2 billion megawatt-hours that are produced by burning coal, the fuel upon which we rely most heavily for electricity generation. Additionally, McCain didn't mention the estimated $315 billion cost, or how it would be funded (a hint: taxpayers may ultimately be on the hook for much of it). Or what he would do about disposing of nuclear waste, though he’s recently looked at shipping it to Siberia.

But I digress. We’re looking at Democratic candidate Barack Obama this week, and his approach to combating global warming.

Obama’s energy plan sets a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a more ambitious cutback than the 50 percent target set by the G-8 major industrial nations, which President Bush agreed to in July. Like McCain, Obama would establish a cap-and-trade system under which the government would set a ceiling on carbon emissions, and then issue permits to emit carbon. That, in turn, would allow companies to make money by reducing their emissions and then selling their permits to others. Unlike McCain, who would initially give away the permits, Obama would auction them off from the get-go, which he argues would ensure that polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, giving them an even bigger incentive to clean up their act. Obama also would require that utility companies generate at least 10 percent of their electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources by 2012.