MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 31 Jan 2009
Obama swings into
action
Our
new president is wasting no time.
He signed executive orders to close the reviled detention center at
Guantanamo Bay and to review detention and interrogation practices. He overturned a counterproductive ban
on U.S. support to international aid groups that provide abortion services, a
move that will be welcomed by rational people but denounced by fundamentalist
ideologues. He issued to federal
agencies a memo on the Freedom of Information Act reversing the Bush
administration's policy of generally opposing FOIA requests.
Most
importantly, his appointments of George Mitchell and Richard Holbrook as
special envoys to the Mideast and Afghanistan/Pakistan, respectively, have
already initiated a new foreign policy grounded in smart diplomacy rather than
threats and violence. You couldn't
find better people for these jobs.
They both deserve the world's applause, Mitchell for leading the way to
a solution of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Holbrook for
the peace accords ending three years of war in Bosnia. Mitchell's appointment signals a
welcome era of active U.S. diplomacy in the Mideast, following eight years of
Bush administration neglect.
Obama,
like most Democrats, believes that government should act whenever it can
usefully help solve problems.
Unlike most Republicans and many Democrats, he is a pragmatist and not
an ideologue. Instead of beginning
from a belief, such as "abortion is always wrong," and then bending
facts to justify that belief, he begins from real-world problems and follows
his brains and the evidence to find solutions.
Moving
quickly in his appointments, he's chosen a real all-star team in science,
energy, and the environment. First
and foremost is the new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu.
Chu
is a scientific renaissance man.
He won the 1997 Nobel Prize for developing (with two other physicists)
the "optical molasses" that uses laser light to slow down individual
atoms to less than one mile per hour.
A gas of such atoms has a temperature of only one-millionth of a degree,
giving it unique properties that are of fundamental scientific interest and
that lead to fantastic new developments such as lasers based on quantum
"matter waves" rather than light waves. Following this pure research, he felt a need to serve the
public by applying his mind to energy-related social problems, becoming
director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) that specializes
in, among other things, energy and the environment.
Chu
was propelled to make this move by his concern over global warming. "It's quite sobering," he
says. "This is a problem we
have to address, and we have a limited amount of time to do it. What we do in the first half of this
century, we will see the consequences of for the next 500 or 1000 years. We don't have the option to
fail." At LBNL, he teamed up
to build a $125 million BioEnergy Institute, obtained a $500 million investment
by energy giant BP to propel advances in nanotechnology and biology in order to
make biofuels, and pursued an initiative to develop nanotech-based photovoltaic
solar cells.
Another
brilliant appointment is John Holdren as the president's science advisor and
director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I've known Holdren and followed his
career for decades. He's the
perfect image of the bright public-interest scientist, with special interests
in nuclear weapons proliferation, energy, and climate. He's a fervent supporter of
publicly-funded research into such socially relevant fields as energy
efficiency and solar energy. He
runs the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, which studies how human
activity affects the global environment.
Like Chu, he takes global warming very seriously, saying that "the
most demanding part of the energy/environment/prosperity challenge is posed by
anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change."
Obama
has appointed another top scientist and humanitarian, marine ecologist Jane
Lubchenco, as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the agency responsible for studying climate, and for keeping an
eye on marine life. She's been one
of the critics of Bush's lack of respect for climate science. Among many other accomplishments, in
1997 she co-authored the classic research paper "Human domination of
Earth's ecosystems" showing that we live on a human-dominated planet. Both Lubchenco and Holdren are past
presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, perhaps
the world's leading scientific organization.
The
President has created a special White House office on energy and climate and is
heading it with Carol Browner.
Browner administered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for eight
years under President Bill Clinton.
She has declared the Bush administration "the worst environmental
administration ever," and says that global warming is "the greatest
challenge ever faced."
And
as the new administrator of the EPA, Obama has chosen Lisa Jackson. Jackson declares that
"science must be at the backbone of what EPA does," and that
political appointees will not warp scientific conclusions in order to promote
pre-conceived outcomes. This is a
breath of fresh air after eight years of Bush administration distortions. She is expected to permit California to
impose its own tailpipe greenhouse gas emission standards, permission that was
denied by Bush.
These
are good administrators, but more importantly they are top scientists and
intelligently engaged human beings.
These appointments demonstrate that Obama takes nature seriously. He's not like the ideologues who think
that if they ignore nature, it will go away and stop bothering them. Thus he
has surrounded himself with people who seek the truth, who will present the
truth insofar as they can determine it, and who will not bend the evidence to
confirm prior beliefs.