A Call For Science Policy Debate Among Presidential Candidates

Marissa Fessenden writes about a campaign to get Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to address important scientific issues in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. ScienceDebate.org and Scientific American have posed a set of questions to the candidates, as well as congressional leaders, and they're rallying support for those questions to be answered before the election. The responses will be published and graded for citizens to see. The questions include topics such as biosecurity, climate change, the safety of food and water supplies, vaccination, and environmentally sustainable energy. This comes at a time when the basic scientific literacy of elected officials is under heavy scrutiny.

Comments

What about Ron Paul?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Ron Paul? He is not out yet. I have yet to see any evidence of him dropping out of the race.

Re:Loaded questions? Sort of.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Republicans might latch onto this debate, because the biggest issue is now firmly in their favor. We are on track to hit our Kyoto protocol goal of reducing CO2 to 1990 levels, having hit 1992 levels this year. Environmentally sustainable energy is now a huge win for Republicans as it wasn't Priuses, EPA regulations, or cap and trade, but petroleum engineers and fracking that got us there. The government has been actively trying to stop fracking, regardless of the settled science that it is safe.

How much fun would Romney have pointing out all of Obama's failed green policies to stop climate change while then pointing to the dreaded fracking as the solution, which is not only the leading source of non-government jobs in the US, but what has rendered the climate change debate moot.

Well, that'll be a short debate.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Both candidates are pig-ignorant when it comes to scientific matters and so are their VPs.

It would, of course, have significant comedy value and so might be worthwhile, particularly if we bring up peak oil, global warming, nuclear waste disposal, NASA, and the long term implications of makerbots and artificial intelligence. Their deer-in-the-headlights expressions and stupid comments could provide months of comedy material.