The NY Times has published a fascinating profile of Jane Lubchenco, the recently approved head of the NOAA:
The marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco has long urged scientists to abandon the habitual reticence of the research community and spend more time engaging the public and public officials about scientific and technical issues.
Now Dr. Lubchenco, a professor at Oregon State University, is following her own advice all the way to Washington to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the government’s premier science agencies.
This is only the latest step in a long career of practicing what she preached. In 1997, as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Lubchenco called for “a new social contract” for science, aimed at helping policy makers take steps to sustain the biosphere.
The next year, she founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains environmental researchers in communication, policy-making and related skills.
She was an organizer of the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, which since 1999 has offered information on marine conservation science to policy makers and the public. And she was a founding director of Climate Central, a Web site that went online last year with what she calls “credible and nonadvocacy” information on global warming.
Although some global warming dissidents expressed dismay over President Obama’s choice of an outspoken climate activist to head a leading government agency that deals with climate issues, a wide range of scientists acclaimed the appointment — and Dr. Lubchenco was approved by the Senate without objection on Thursday.
“If you look at her record, it’s pretty stunning,” said Jeremy B. C. Jackson, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He cited a range of her work, including what he called “path-breaking” studies on the ecology of algae and seaweed, her deciphering of biological interactions along rocky shorelines and her wider assessments of environmental sustainability.
It’s a longish piece that touches on several interesting points and is definitely worth your time to read in full. Personally, I was delighted to find someone with that level of commitment to public service in such an important “science role” in the US government.
For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on the part quoted above, and how it relates to our current energy and environmental situation, as well as how we view our individual roles in the coming years and decades.
I want to make it excruciatingly, redundantly, annoyingly clear at the outset that I’m not one of those people who expects or wants the whole world to leap to the ramparts to fight for my personal hot button issues. We certainly have more than enough of those online at the various E&E sites, and one more would be a step in the wrong direction.
I also have a very traditional, perhaps idealistic, view of science and scientists. I would strongly prefer to see a metaphorical wall between science and policy, with scientists doing their thing and policymakers doing theirs. This is unrealistic, of course, given how much of what policymakers do, from passing laws to directly funding research, that impacts what scientists can do. But my inclination is still to have the scientists stay out of public policy, and the politicians to consider what the scientists say to be reality and not merely another political weapon for their next ideological crusade or election campaign.
When I look at our two big challenges of peak oil and climate chaos[1], my idealism withers before the overwhelming urgency of our current situation. We simply don’t have the luxury of time to keep everyone on their own side of my metaphorical wall and let things work themselves out “in due course”. When we’re this close to a point of no return on climate and this close to the worldwide peak in oil production, then we have to take a lot of risks or suffer far more pain from inaction. These risks most notably include much more drastic public policy measures, which will certainly result in some expensive mistakes (corn ethanol simply leaps to mind as one example), and trying some truly science-fictional things, like one or more geoengineering schemes. In essence, we’ll have to make a lot of educated guesses that will have enormous ramifications, and many of those guesses will be colored by brute force politics.
I don’t like that situation in the least, and I hope no one reading this site likes it, either.[2] But I thin it would be incredibly disingenuous to try to wish it away. Peak oil is real and imminent, and climate chaos is real and already present. Both situations will only get worse over the next decade or two, potentially far worse if we’re stupid enough not to act in our own self interest.
In a slightly broader sense, this discussion of unpleasantries touches on something I’ve been talking about since I launched this site (albeit originally with respect to just peak oil): Everyone from every corner of the ideological landscape will have things to love and things to hate. Government haters will get more government and nuclear power haters will get more nukes (although it remains to be seen just how large the “nuclear renaissance” will be, given the role economics will play); solar and wind power lovers will get more of both, and those distrustful of corporations will get both more money funneled in their direction as well as more regulations placed on them. You can no doubt add many examples of your own to the lovers and haters lists.
This is the world we’ve created for ourselves and our descendants, and it requires us, assuming enough of us have the intelligence to recognize what’s going on, to have the courage to break the old rules of business as usual and find better ways to do almost everything that human beings do. This means change at all levels of society, from the largest governments, corporations, and other concentrations of economic and other power, down to individuals. It’s a hell of a mess, but the only people who are more wrong about it than the ones who can’t or refuse to see the problems are those who think it’s beyond our ability to fix.
[1] Of course, those are my picks for the two big challenges, for reasons regular readers know quite well. I’m sure other people would pick other issues as “the” big ones most deserving of our attention, and even argue about the number of critical issues.
[2] The Apocalypticons who see it as a sign of our impending, well, doom, and the Cornucopians who see it as a temporary glitch on our way to whatever econoerotic vision of free market nirvana they secretly foster are both cordially invited to take a flying leap.
