Every now and again I see something that strikes close to home. In addition to good policy recommendations for global climate change, James Hansen adds additional recommendations for use of science in policy discussion, including this: "I don't think the Framers of the Constitution expected that when a government employee — a technical government employee — reports to Congress, his testimony would have to be approved and edited by the White House first. But that is the way it works now. And frankly, I'm afraid it works that way whether it's a Democratic administration or a Republican one."
(via Mark Thoma, Economist's View, 4/20/2007)
James Hansen, one of the leaders in raising awareness about global warming, has five recommendations for solving the problem including a call to reduce the gap between what the scientific community understands and what the public and policy-makers are led to believe:
Why We Can't Wait, by James Hansen, The Nation: There's a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known … by … the public and policy-makers. We've had, in the past thirty years, one degree Fahrenheit of global warming. But there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline due to gases that are already in the atmosphere. And there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline because of the energy infrastructure now in place—for example, power plants and vehicles that we're not going to take off the road even if we decide … to address this problem.
The Energy Department says that we're going to continue to put more and more CO2 in the atmosphere each year—not just additional CO2 but more than we put in the year before. If we do…, even for another ten years, it guarantees that we will have dramatic climate changes…
I've arrived at five recommendations for what should be done to address the problem. If Congress were to follow these recommendations, we could solve the problem. …
First, there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2. That technology is probably five or ten years away. It will become clear over the next ten years that coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2 are going to have to be bulldozed. …
Second, and this is the hard recommendation that no politician seems willing to stand up and say is necessary: The only way we are going to prevent having an amount of CO2 that is far beyond the dangerous level is by putting a price on emissions. …
But a price on carbon emissions is not enough, which brings us to the third recommendation: We need energy-efficiency standards. That's been proven time and again. …
The fourth recommendation—and this is probably the easiest one—involves the question of ice-sheet stability. …The concern is that it's a very nonlinear process that could accelerate. …[T]his problem with the stability of ice sheets is so critical that it really should be looked at by a panel of our best scientists. Congress should ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a study … The National Academy of Sciences was established by Abraham Lincoln for just this sort of purpose, and there's no reason we shouldn't use it that way.
The final recommendation concerns how we have gotten into this situation in which there is a gap between what the relevant scientific community understands and what the public and policy-makers know. A fundamental premise of democracy is that the public is informed and that they're honestly informed. There are at least two major ways in which this is not happening. One of them is that the public affairs offices of the science agencies are staffed at the headquarters level by political appointees. …
Another matter is Congressional testimony. I don't think the Framers of the Constitution expected that when a government employee—a technical government employee—reports to Congress, his testimony would have to be approved and edited by the White House first. But that is the way it works now. And frankly, I'm afraid it works that way whether it's a Democratic administration or a Republican one.
These problems are worse now than I've seen in my thirty years in government. But they're not new. I don't know anything in our Constitution that says that the executive branch should filter scientific information going to Congressional committees. Reform of communication practices is needed if our government is to function the way our Founders intended it to work.
The global warming problem has brought into focus an overall problem: the pervasive influence of special interests on the functioning of our government and on communications with the public. It seems to me that it will be difficult to solve the global warming problem until we have effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests no longer have such a big influence on policy-makers.
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