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

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.

Should We Build More Nuclear Power Plants?

January 25, 2008

I have to admit that for a long time, I’ve had a lot of qualms about nuclear power as a source of electricity. I was in college in Pennsylvania during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and I remember being downwind as a pretty scary experience.  (The alarmist antinuclear thriller The China Syndrome, which I saw the weekend after the accident, added a bit to my anxiety, especially that line of dialogue about a nuclear meltdown’s potential to render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.)  Fortunately, the partial core meltdown of TMI’s unit 2 reactor was brought under control before a disaster of gigantic proportions could occur. But seven years later, when a reactor suffered a steam explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then-Soviet Union, the Soviets and their European neighbors weren’t so lucky. The accident spread radiation as far as the UK and Sweden, and a 2005 international report estimated that the area surrounding the stricken reactor will suffer as many as 4,000 additional deaths from cancer. After TMI and Chernobyl, I figured, nuclear power was pretty much dead. The only concerns left, I figured, were the problems of safely maintaining the aging nuclear power plants already in existence, and figuring out what to do with the radioactive waste building up on site at those plants.

But the rapidly developing global warming crisis has forced me — and a lot of other people, I suspect — to at least reconsider my opposition to nuclear power. Seventy percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by power plants that burn fossil fuels, and as a result, we’re pumping ungodly amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And the explosively growing nations of China and India are doing their best to burn even more coal to generate electricity than we do. Energy conservation on a massive global scale is what we really need, but good luck with convincing Americans — and everyone else across the planet who aspires to a blithely affluent U.S. lifestyle — to carpool or turn down their air conditioning in the summer, let alone unplug the appliances and electronic gadgets that turn into energy-wasting  “vampire devices” when they’re idle.

So what do we do? In 2006, one-time Greenpeace International director Patrick Moore wrote a Washington Post opinion piece advocating the building of more nuclear power plants as a way of reducing dependence upon fossil fuels and curbing climate change. Moore argued that nuclear power was a more viable source of greenhouse emissions-free power than other alternative energy sources:

"Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple."

Moore discounted the criticisms that many opponents of nuclear power have raised. Even the horrific accident at Chernobyl, he noted, caused fewer deaths than the 5,000 deaths in coal-mining accidents worldwide each year. And as for the problem of disposing nuclear waste, he wrote that

"Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind."

He’s not the only one who supports building more nuclear power plants. According to this chart compiled by the environmental news and commentary Web site Grist, not only do all the remaining Republican presidential candidates support expanded use of nuclear power, but the two top Democratic contenders are at least lukewarm to the idea. (Sen. Barack Obama, whose home state of Illinois gets 40 percent of its power from nuclear plants, told CNN in November 2007 that while nuclear wasn’t his most favored option, “it has to be part of our energy mix,” while Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York  in August 2007 described herself as “agnostic” about nuclear power. (Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is opposed to building more plants, and congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio wants to dismantle existing ones.)

So what do you think? Should we build more nuclear power plants? Or should we focus harder on energy conservation and developing solar, wind and geothermal technologies instead? Express your opinion below.

Should U.S. Presidential Candidates Stake Out a Policy Position on UFOs?

November 08, 2007

In addition to the Iraq war, global warming and other important world issues, voters and the news media have been pressing 2008 presidential candidates for their positions on extraterrestrial matters as well. Here’s a video clip of former New York mayor and GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani at a town meeting in New Hampshire, being quizzed about how he would respond to an attack on the U.S. by space aliens. (“Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will. We'll be prepared for anything that happens," was Hizzoner’s response.) According to this Fort Worth Star-Telegram story, New Mexico Gov. and Democratic contender Bill Richardson revealed to a questioner at a Texas event that as a member of Congress, he had asked for access to U.S. Department of Defense files on the infamous Roswell UFO incident, but was rebuffed because the information was classified. (“That ticked me off,” he added.) And in the most recent Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich confirmed a published claim that he had once seen a gigantic triangular craft hovering silently for 10 minutes over the home of actress-turned-New Age maven Shirley MacLaine.  “I did," Kucinich admitted. "It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It's like, it's unidentified; I saw something."  As this article from Rawstory.com recounts, Kucinich subsequently contended — not quite correctly — that more Americans have seen UFOs  than approve of President Bush’s job performance. (According to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll, 34 percent of Americans believe in UFOs, roughly the same number who support Bush.)

The Democratic front-runner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is probably a bit too cautious to speak out about the possibility of alien spacecraft visiting Earth. Nevertheless, Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein reports that Stephen Bassett, chief lobbyist for the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, is leaning toward supporting the former first lady, in part because Clinton adviser (and her husband’s former chief of staff) John Podesta has advocated declassification and release of Defense Department files on a purported UFO sighting in Kecksburg, Pa., in 1965. (“It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon," Podesta told CNN in 2002.)

Some might consider the UFO issue a bit too, well, wacky for a potential president to even bother thinking about. But others, such as Richardson, argue that it’s time for full disclosure of whatever the government knows about UFO incidents, if only in the interest of transparency and restoring trust that has been eroded by the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy. Give us your opinion here.