Science Policy and Politics Archives
Climate science was supposed to unite us, on the left and the right, and result in common, concerted action. Instead, the science of climate change has proved to be ideologically polarizing. In a speech for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus explain why climate science divides us. By contrast, energy technology may actually be able to transcend politics and unify Republicans and Democrats alike.
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[Updated 1/11/2011: Robert Stavins was previously misidentified as the former chief economist of the Environmental Defense Fund. He is a former staff economist. We regret the error.]
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Thank you very much. We'd like to start by thanking William Ott for inviting us to give this colloquium, which is an honor. NIST has a long record of advancing innovation by developing new ways of measuring new natural phenomena and creating standards for critical technologies. The Institute, famous for the first atomic clock, played a critical role in creating the technologies behind modern computers, semiconductors, sonar, and blood pressure machines. We are grateful for NIST's work and reminded of the critical role played by America's sustained investments in science and technology in creating our prosperity.
It may be hard to remember now but it wasn't that long ago that much of the American political establishment came to believe that the science of climate would transcend ideological and national boundaries and result in common national and global action. The idea was that climate scientists would tell us what the safe level of atmospheric emissions was, and that nations would take shared steps to reducing their emissions over the next 50 years.
But things didn't work out that way. The United Nations treaty process has devolved into an endless exercise in empty promises and angry recriminations. The growth of global carbon emissions has only accelerated in the 13 years since Kyoto was signed. The United States failed last summer for the fourth time in seven years to cap its emissions while Europe, which supposedly has, has seen its emissions grow faster than the United States since 1997.
Continue reading "Why Climate Science Divides Us But Energy Technology Unites Us" »
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Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. and co-editor Roberta Klein of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado released a new book documenting the role of the presidential science adviser as well as the reflections of previous advisors, including those who served under Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.
The two editors co-authored an essay critically analyzing what has become a controversial presidential position. The book also contains an introduction authored by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dan Sarewitz.
You can read a brief overview of the book as well as preview the table of contents here.
The way we frame society's problems informs how we choose to respond to them. Leigh Ewbank argues that carbon dioxide should not be described as pollution.
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Cross posted from the ABC (Australia Broadcasting Company)
By Leigh Ewbank, Breakthrough Fellow
RECENTLY, THE AUSTRALIAN Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) released Creating Jobs - Cutting Pollution, a new report that investigates how reducing our carbon dioxide output will benefit the Australian economy. Not surprisingly for me, the report finds that our transition to a clean energy economy yields excellent job-creation prospects for Australia. But amid this positive economic forecast is a framing of climate change that has several limitations and implications for policy.
Creating Jobs - Cutting Pollution (pdf) frames climate change as a pollution problem. This frame is consistent with the title of the Rudd government's chief climate change policy, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and is a dominant way of communicating the problem of climate change in Australia.
The pollution frame shows how we understand, or in this case misunderstand, the phenomenon. What is meant by pollution in the context of climate change? Does the same language used for sewage overflows, chemical leaks, and oil spills adequately communicate the steps needed to address the challenge?
Continue reading "Why CO2 should not be considered pollution" »
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By Teryn Norris
Cross-posted from Americans for Energy Leadership
Today, the House of Representatives passed the flagship U.S. competitiveness and innovation legislation, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (full text and summary), by a vote of 262 to 150. The House Science & Technology (S&T) Committee press release is here and a full breakdown of the vote is here, including 245 Democrats and 17 Republicans in favor, 0 Democrats and 150 Republicans opposed.
The passage comes after the proposal was blocked twice within the past two weeks on the House floor, triggering significant alarm among the science and technology community. The first incident on May 13th involved a "Motion to Recommit" attached to an anti-pornography amendment, introduced by S&T Committee Ranking Member Ralph Hall (R-TX), which forced many members to vote to send the bill back to committee. The second incident on May 19th occurred when the bill failed to reach the two-thirds majority required under procedures that were used, despite the inclusion of the anti-pornography amendment and a cut in the authorization level by nearly 50 percent.
Continue reading "House Passes Competitiveness Bill After Near-Collapse" »
In part 2, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome expounds on the scientific and anti-scientific basis of environmentalism, explaining the role of morality in the effort to mitigate climate change.
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To read Part 1 click here.
 GE Food for Thought On climate, Greens point to the science, but on GE crops, many find science unconvincing. By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome
The Scientific Basis of Environmentalism
Modern American environmentalism was born in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson was a scientist and much of the book is a scientific argument about the harmful effects of chemical pesticides.
The book is replete with scientific data, quotes from scientists, and scientific reasoning. In fact, the entire concluding chapter is an impassioned plea to adopt new biology based breakthrough technologies to replace chemical pesticides.
According to Carson,
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing - entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists - all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.
Carson characterized chemical pesticides of the time as "Neanderthal" technologies, belonging to the "stone age of science". Clearly, the implication was not that we should replace chemical pesticides with even more ancient Jurassic-era technologies, but rather that we supplant them with advanced biology-based breakthrough technologies that are more environmentally friendly.
Continue reading "Green VS. Green, Part 2" »
Greens argue that the scientific evidence in support of climate change tell us we must take action yet they simultaneously ignore potential solutions -- like nuclear power and GE food -- despite scientific evidence that they are useful tools. In the first part of a two post series, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome discusses this perplexing Green paradox.
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To read Part 2 click here.
By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome
 Denmark Dispute Greens tout Denmark as a renewable mecca, but Sweden -- powered largely by hydro and nuclear -- has a far less carbon intense energy mix. Here's a pop quiz. A, B, C, and D are four rich industrialized countries in Western Europe with similar living standards. Country A's carbon dioxide emissions stand at 9.24 tonnes per capita per year. The corresponding figures for countries B, C, and D are 5.81, 5.62, and 5.05 tonnes a year, respectively.
Can you guess which of these four countries has become the darling of the environmental movement, hailed as a model for a low carbon economy?
It is country A, Denmark -- even though its per capita CO2 emissions are almost twice as much as countries B (France), C (Switzerland), and D (Sweden).
Continue reading "Green VS. Green, Part 1" »
The America COMPETES incident is an alarming example of how U.S. technological leadership is being threatened - not by some foreign entity, but from within our own country. How did we get to this point, and what lessons might the incident hold?
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By Teryn Norris
May 26, 2010
Published by The Huffington Post
Last week, the flagship federal legislation for U.S. competitiveness containing broad support for science, technology, and advanced education - called the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 - collapsed in Congress after it was blocked from passage through the House, despite already being significantly weakened.
Enter the age of American polarization, where bread-and-butter competitiveness and innovation policy is subject to hyper-partisan politics and obstructionism, even in the face of rapidly rising global competition. America COMPETES, which was originally passed with strong bipartisan support under President Bush, may be yet one more casualty of today's extreme political polarization, which according to one major study is at the highest level in over a century.
But beyond the issue of partisanship, this is an alarming wake-up call to how anti-government sentiment and neoliberal economic ideology - which seeks to discredit the role of federal investment in promoting technology innovation and growth - could combine forces and seriously damage our national innovation system in the years ahead.
The United States was a driving force behind the global expansion of prosperity and security in the 20th century, due in large part to our technological leadership. The collapse of America COMPETES is one of the clearest and most alarming examples in recent history of how this leadership is being threatened - not by some foreign entity, but from within our own country. How did we get to this point, and what lessons might this incident hold?
Continue reading "The Collapse of Competitiveness Policy?" »
The U.S. House of Representatives failed in its second attempt to pass the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, a flagship bill for U.S. competitiveness.
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Originally published at LeadEnergy.org
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives failed in its second attempt
to pass the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, a flagship bill for
U.S. competitiveness containing broad support for science and
technology innovation, including funding authorization for energy
innovation and education programs. The bill, which was
re-introduced on the floor again today after getting derailed last
week, was blocked by a minority of House Republican members despite the
uncontroversial and bipartisan nature of the legislation. It was
brought forward for a vote under the House's suspension process, which
forbids further amendments but requires a two-thirds majority, which
the bill failed to meet on a vote of 261-148 (290 votes required, full
breakdown available here).
Continue reading "House Fails to Pass America COMPETES Bill" »
Global climate policy should be radically overhauled in the wake of the failure of the United Nations process, an international group of 14 climate policy experts and scientists argue in the "Hartwell Paper." Instead of the failed Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables, what's needed is a focus on expanding access to energy for the poor, quickly reducing non-CO2 climate forcings, and adaptation to changing climate.
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Global climate policy should be radically overhauled in the wake of the failure of the United Nations process, an international group of 14 climate policy experts and scientists argue in a new paper. The Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables was bound to fail because it proposed a single over-arching framework to deal with a "wickedly' complex problem. Instead what's needed is a focus on expanding access to energy for the poor, quickly reducing non-CO2 climate forcings, and adaptation to changing climate.
The paper brings together a set of ideas that have been developing over the last decade. The meeting was convened by Gwyn Prins of London School of Ecomomics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who wrote "The Wrong Trousers," a 2007 critique of Kyoto. The group included, among others, East Anglia University climate scientist Mike Hulme, author of "Why We Disagree About Climate Change," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, the economist Chris Green, co-author of a 2002 Science article calling for advanced energy research to stabilize climate emissions, and University of Colorado's Roger Pielke and Arizona State's Dan Sarewitz, authors of a 2000 Atlantic magazine story arguing climate policy to shift focus to technology innovation and adaptation. Green, Pielke, and Sarewitz are all Breakthrough Senior Fellows.
Continue reading "Hartwell Paper: A New Approach on Global Climate Policy" »
Nordhaus and Shellenberger in Yale e360
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Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.
More research makes the controversy worse, says Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dan Sarewitz in Slate.
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The conventional wisdom among greens and liberals for the last 20 years has been that more climate science research would lead to political consensus but as Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dan Sarewitz points out, that hasn't happened. Now he argues in Slate that more climate science has made climate politics even more polarized:
"When people hold strongly conflicting values, interests, and beliefs, there is not much that science can do to compel action. Indeed, more research and more facts often make a conflict worse by providing support to competing sides in the debate, and by distracting decision-makers and the public from the underlying, political disagreement. In such cases each side will claim to have the scientific high ground."
Climate change e-mail scandal underscores myth of pure science. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dan Sarewitz and co-author Samuel Thernstrom in an LA Times op-ed.
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The necessary boundary between climate science and politics has become indiscernible as politicians on both sides of the political spectrum invoke "pure" science as the justification for climate policy, said Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dan Sarewitz and co-author Samuel Thernstrom in an Los Angeles Times commentary on the lesson learned from ClimateGate.
"As two scholars with different political orientations but common concerns, we have each worked to challenge conventional wisdom that has undermined public understanding of the climate change problem. Many Republicans have been too reluctant to acknowledge strong evidence of human-caused warming and the need for prudent policies that could reduce its harmful effects. Democrats have let their own political judgments and values infect climate science and its interpretation, often understating the uncertainties about the timing and scale of future risks, and the tremendous costs and difficulties of effective action.
Yet both parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If "pure" science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change."
Sarewitz and Thernstrom go on to explain that even though the East Anglia e-mails do not discredit the significant body of evidence pointing to anthropogenic global warming, scientists who claim they are "unsullied providers of truth in an otherwise corrupt and indecipherable world," are misrepresenting the nature of the scientific inquiry and perpetrating a "myth of pure, disinterested science."
Continue reading "Science Can't Tell Us What to Do" »
Nordhaus and Shellenberger in Yale e360.
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In Yale e360.org, Ted and Michael make the case that the recent decline in the public's belief in global warming is partly due to apocalypse fatigue. Mobilizing the public around an abstract, distant and long-term issue like climate change is hard enough. What makes it even harder is when advocates of action engage in an apocalyptic and hyper-partisan discourse demanding changes to the American way of life. "Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action," they write, "apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science."
Update (12/7/2009): Citing Nordhaus and Shellenberger, The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in on "apocalypse fatigue" with a thoughtful piece discussing public attitudes towards climate change and the challenge of engaging the public in such an abstract but urgent problem.
Experts reason that, after years of warnings of future disaster and protracted negotiations to achieve a climate treaty, a sense of fatigue has set in. The worldwide recession also has people focused on keeping their jobs, if they even have one, and on keeping a roof over their heads. That may be one reason President Obama rarely talks about climate change itself but frequently mentions the "green" jobs that fighting it will create.
Some even argue that Gore - his Nobel Prize notwithstanding - is a poor standard-bearer for the cause because he is seen as a partisan politician...
In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarize the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause," argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in the article "Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change," written for Yale Environment 360 magazine, a publication of Yale University's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Just up today at Yale e360, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' latest op-ed tackles the issue of "apocalypse fatigue".
Make no mistake, despite the ever growing consensus that global warming is a human induced problem, roughly fifteen percent fewer Americans believe that this is the case when compared with polls from as recent as April 2008 (from 71% in Apr 08, to 56% in Oct 09). Many pollsters blame the polls themselves for being flawed, many blame the recession. To get the whole picture, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue, one must examine the way the global apocalyptic narrative is being "sold" to us.
The truth is both simpler and more complicated. It is simpler in the sense that most Americans just aren't paying a whole lot of attention. Between being asked about things like whether they would provide CPR to save the life of a pet (most pet owners say yes ) or whether they would allow their child to be given the swine flu vaccine (a third of parents say no), pollsters occasionally get around to asking Americans what they think about global warming. When they do, Americans find a variety of ways to tell us that they don't think about it very much at all.
Three years after it seemed that "An Inconvenient Truth" had changed everything, it turns out that it didn't. The current Pew survey is the latest in a series of studies suggesting that Al Gore probably had a good deal more effect upon elite opinion than public opinion.
Public opinion about global warming, it turns out, has been remarkably stable for the better part of two decades, despite the recent decline in expressed public confidence in climate science.
Further:
What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The more complicated questions have to do with why. Why have Americans been so consistently supportive of action to address climate change yet so weakly committed? Why has two decades of education and advocacy about climate change had so little discernible impact on public opinion? And why, at the height of media coverage and publicity about global warming in the years after the release of Gore's movie, did confidence in climate science actually appear to decline?
Read the full story here at Yale Environment 360.
Media Coverage of Apocalypse Fatigue:
The Christian Science Monitor: "Global Warming, Why Public Concern Declines"
A chapter from Controversies in Science and Technology Volume 2: From Climate to Chromosomes by Roger Pielke and Dan Sarewitz ( PDF)
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The climate system of the planet earth, and the energy system built by those who inhabit the earth, are today seen as the integrated elements of a single problem: global warming. In turn, scientific inquiry, public concern, and policy prescription have given rise to an international regime for controlling the behavior of the climate through management of the global energy system. In this chapter we explain why this regime, and in particular its codification through the Kyoto Protocol, is a failure. Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts.
Download the PDF chapter.
Alternately, you can buy the full book here.
Download the intro to Roger Pielke's 2007 book here. ( PDF)
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"Scientists have a choice concerning what role they should play in political debates and policy formation, particularly in terms of how they present their research." -Roger Pielke, The Honest Broker
Read the introduction here.
Purchase the full book here.
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