November 2008 Archives

As the stock market reaches another low, the scientific community is starting to query the short-term plans of the approaching Obama administration. Will Barack Obama maintain his commitment to high investment in energy efficiency and new renewable energy technologies in his first term? What will he do about climate change? What impact will Obama's new policy advisers have in the START negotiations with Russia to reduce nuclear warheads and improve the security at nuclear weapons installations? What will he do about Iran's enrichment program? And will he provide extra support to universities as state budget cuts and significant declines in the endowment portfolios of private universities are causing hiring and salary freezes?

Some of these questions were answered on Thursday when Obama addressed a global warming summit in California via video. The summit was attended by some 600 state and international officials. The address was clearly timed to influence the December 1-12 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which has as one of its goals to renew and extend the Kyoto Protocol agreement by December 2009. Obama says in the video that he will not attend the Poznan meeting "because the United States has only ... one president at a time."

Obama also made clear, however, that there will be a change in tactics under his administration. "Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change," he said. "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear....Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."

Obama confirmed that the US would once again accept international targets to reduce its own CO₂ emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions. "We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050," he said.

Obama added in his speech that he is committed to pumping $150 billion into the economy to cut oil consumption dramatically and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, partly through increasing automobile efficiency and partly by closing down coal-fired power plants or adapting them to clean-coal technologies.

Transition news

As Obama publicly spells out some of the policy changes to expect, the new transition teams are busy quietly evaluating the ways in which the president-elect's goals can be implemented. To do so, individuals close to Obama's transition team met with members of the American Physical Society's energy efficiency study group on Tuesday to discuss their recent report that laid out a roadmap and some scientific limitations on energy efficiency. The transition teams have also been talking to former members of the Clinton administration who have close links to Iran and Russia, to find out ways in which diplomatic pressure can be applied.

According to the transition website, 1995 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Mario Molina of the University of California, San Diego, and former White House science and technology official Thomas Kalil will review the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Earlier this year Kalil said that the next president must restore "integrity to US science and technology policy so that decisions are made on the basis of facts and not ideology."

Under Tom Wheeler's direction in the working group association with science and technology (see last week's report), Lori Garver, the president of Capital Space, LLC, a consulting firm with deep ties to the space community, will be reviewing NASA along with industrial analyst Roderic Olvera Young. Garver argued for more support for NASA during the election, and previously advised the Clinton campaign in the primaries.

Former vice president Al Gore's domestic policy adviser Jim Kohlenberger and telecommunications lawyer Henry M. Rivera will be leading a review of the National Science Foundation.

The group associated with assessing the US Department of Energy will be led by Elgie Holstein, a senior energy policy adviser to the Obama campaign. Holstein was the associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science at the Office of Management & Budget and chief of staff at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.

Holstein will be joined by consultant Elizabeth Montoya, who was previously deputy chief of staff at the Department of Energy, and analyst Sue Tierney, who previously served as assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Energy, under President Clinton.

Paul Guinnessy

With little new information to go on in the post-election lull, the media has continued to circulate and recirculate speculation concerning President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming agenda and possible picks for senior-level appointments. By the end of the week, however, Obama had announced only a handful of appointments, none of which were permanent positions or will require Senate confirmation. In addition to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) as his chief of staff, the incoming chief executive named three individuals to co-chair his transition team: Valerie Jarrett, CEO of Chicago-based developer Habitat Co; John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and head of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP); and Peter Rouse, who was Obama’s chief of staff in the Senate.

The framework of Obama’s transition process began to emerge with the naming of 14 members of an “agency review working group,” which will oversee and coordinate the work of the review teams that are fanning out to individual federal agencies.

Venture capital executive Tom Wheeler was named as the working group member with responsibility for agencies that have missions in science, technology, space, and arts. Wheeler is on leave of absence from Core Capital Partners, which invests in early-stage technology companies. David Hayes, an environmental lawyer affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund and the Progressive Policy Institute, was designated as the working group member for the energy and natural resources agencies. Sarah Sewall, on part-time leave from Harvard’s Kennedy School, was named the group’s member for the national security agencies. It wasn’t immediately clear how the transition team might slice up agencies such as the US Department of Energy, whose missions include defense, energy, science, and the environment. Tom Perez, currently secretary of Maryland’s Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation, will oversee the Health and Human Services Department, parent agency of the National Institutes of Health.

Obama has promised to create a new position of chief technology officer to coordinate information technology policy throughout the federal government. The president-elect signaled that he will focus initially on populating the agencies that have traditionally been considered the most critical: the State, Defense, and Treasury departments. He also reiterated his intent to adopt tough new ethics rules to bar the revolving door through which so many presidential appointees have turned lobbyists.

The Washington Post reported that advisers to Obama had identified around 200 executive orders and actions taken by the Bush administration that the incoming president intends to quickly reverse. Those include the severe restrictions on the use of human embryonic stem cells Bush ordered in 2001.

Former Clinton science adviser Neal Lane, in an article he co-wrote on a CAP blog, urged the new administration to establish a commission to chart a new course for NASA. Items to be revisited should include the decision to retire the space shuttles by 2010, the timeline envisioned in Bush’s plan for returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020, and the aeronautics research program, whose budget declined by nearly one-third from fiscal year 2004 to FY 2007.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, infighting broke out among House Democrats even as they consolidated their gains from the election. A challenge for the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, held by 82-year-old John Dingell of Michigan, was issued by Rep. Henry Waxman, who is currently chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Dingell is the longest-serving member of the House and has long resisted moves to impose tougher mileage standards on US automakers. His committee also has lead jurisdiction for legislation dealing with climate change.

The chairmanships of some other key House and Senate committees will change. Most notably, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd will turn over the gavel of the Appropriations Committee to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who will be vacating his chairmanship of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia is next in seniority to head Commerce.

—David Kramer

Imagine, if you will, pouring your morning coffee and sitting down to breakfast with your favorite newspaper (the old-fashioned paper kind) several months from now. The lead story begins something like this:

"President Barack Obama's science adviser Harold Varmus said at a White House cabinet meeting Wednesday that he fully supports the decision by Environmental Protection Agency director Robert F. Kennedy Jr to tighten restrictions on emissions from coal-fired power plants as part of a cap-and-trade program intended as a first step in cutting US carbon emissions 80% by 2050."

Varmus? Kennedy? A science adviser at a White House cabinet meeting? An environmental lawyer heading the EPA? Goodness.

Although the media is engaged in mass speculation about who will be appointed to what and what those appointments will mean for science, a sentence like the one above could appear in the Washington Post or the New York Times by next spring and seem almost normal. Reams of copy have been written since November 4 about what an Obama administration will mean for science.

While the speculation is just that, the underlying tone in almost all of the articles is that Obama will be very good for science. Here are the main topics being discussed:

Climate Change – Everyone who follows the issue noted Obama's reference to a "planet in peril" during his acceptance speech, and that is being taken as a clear signal that Obama will indeed push early and hard for a goal of reducing US greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and then cutting them by 80% by 2050. This would be done, under proposals Obama discussed prior to the election, through a cap-and-trade program.

Stem Cells – Obama has promised to lift the federal restrictions imposed by the Bush administration on stem cell research, and the assumption in many of the articles is that it will happen soon. "On stem cells, Obama can simply reverse President Bush's August 2001 executive order limiting research to pre-existing cell lines," wrote Chris Mooney on the Science Progress website. In related pieces, the Detroit Free Press ran an article noting that a proposal to loosen restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research in Michigan passed, while this blog focused on the funding difficulties Michigan researchers will face.

While the voters in Michigan were lifting a ban, voters in Colorado were preventing one by rejecting an attempt to amend the state constitution to give fertilized eggs the same rights as human beings. The "Personhood Amendment" was rejected by a 3-to-1 margin.

Energy – The future direction of the Department of Energy as Obama moves toward an alternative-energy emphasis was discussed in detail by Steve Mufson on the Newsweek/Washington Post website at. Mufson speculates on who might be the next energy secretary, with names ranging from Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell to Senator Arlen Specter in the running.

There was also an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal online about the conflict between energy policies and the various green initiatives.

There were several more comprehensive pieces that discussed all of the above topics, as well as the end of the Bush administration's war on science, the future role of science advice, the role of technology in the new administration, science funding, science and overpopulation, and NASA.

A sampling of the better articles includes

For more than a year PHYSICS TODAY tracked the candidates' positions and statements related to a broad range of science issues. For those of you who were undecided over which candidate would have been best for the scientific community, we present to you direct responses from the candidates on their positions as covered by our team of editors:

Science issues are prominent in this year's presidential race

Q: Where do you stand on science education?

Q: Where do you stand on climate change?