Eli Found Another Daniel Sarewitz Comment

Whilst poking about the INTERTUBES, Eli came across the generator that Daniel Sarewitz uses to prepare his Nature columns.  Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think this produces but a pale imitation of the real thing, but Eli knows Artificial Intelligence when he reads it.

UPDATE:  Thingsbreak is a bit more direct:"Sarewitz seems to really love telling science what it “must” do, and it’s all rubbish. . . There are good arguments to make about how we can go about increasing Republican acceptance of science. But those arguments involve changing the way Republicans relate to science, rather than changing the institution of science itself.


And now on to the Sarewitz column

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Imagine if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our energy crisis.  But first, the US scientific community must decide if it wants to be a Democratic interest group or if it wants to reassert its value as an independent national asset. If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity.

With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about energy, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Uzbekistan, the authoritarian crackdown in Gambia and the still-unstable democratic transition in Zambia. 

But the energy problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Democrats seem to think that energy can just be ignored. Republican politicians like Marco Rubio, on the other hand, seem to think that unscientific rhetoric will substitute for a compromise. 

As 2012 begins, we are entering the most important and decisive period for US science and technology policy since the late 1940s. After 60 years dominated by growing federal expenditure, US science now faces a long period of budgetary stasis, or even contraction.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. America's pragmatic culture has long been assumed to favour applied investigation over fundamental science, a notion that goes back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century classic Democracy in America.

But the Republican party of Marco Rubio is not the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wouldn’t just filibuster, he'd compromise because he'd understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of energy.

It's good to see the talks between the president and congress getting off to a solid start, but we know there will be plenty of partisan fireworks before any deal is cut. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I'd tell them two things about energy. First, there's no way around the issue unless we're prepared to spend more: and not just spend more, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of national infrastructure that makes countries succeed. That's going to require some tax increases as well, but as they say, "them's the breaks."

Second, I'd tell them to look at Norway, which all but solved its energy crisis over the past decade. When I visited Norway in 2002, Mwambe, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn't stop telling me about how he had to take a third job because of the high cost of energy. I caught up with Mwambe in Oslo last year. Thanks to Norway's reformed approach toward energy, Mwambe has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford a television set for his kids.

During the cold war, scientists from America and the Soviet Union developed lines of communication to improve the prospects for peace. Given the bitter ideological divisions in the United States today, scientists could reach across the political divide once again and set an example for all.

That's all it takes. Don't expect to see any solutions as long as politicians insist on playing a high-stakes game of blackjack with one another. America's got to call a time-out.