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Lawrence Krauss: Congress Is Trying To Defund Scientists At Energy Department
Lasrick writes Physicist Lawrence Krauss blasts Congress for their passage of the 2015 Energy and Water Appropriations bill that cut funding for renewable energy, sustainable transportation, and energy efficiency, and even worse, had amendments that targeted scientists at the Department of Energy: He writes that this action from the US Congress is worse even than the Australian government's move to cancel their carbon tax, because the action of Congress is far more insidious: "Each (amendment) would, in its own way, specifically prohibit scientists at the Energy Department from doing precisely what Congress should mandate them to do—namely perform the best possible scientific research to illuminate, for policymakers, the likelihood and possible consequences of climate change." Although the bill isn't likely to become law, Krauss is fed up with Congress burying its head in the sand: The fact that those amendments "...could pass a house of Congress, should concern everyone interested in the appropriate support of scientific research as a basis for sound public policy."
You get involved in politics... you take sides... and there are consequences.
NPR for example is under similar threat of being defunded for the same reason. They took sides and when they stopped acting in the interests of all sides they became the enemy of sides they did not support... or the allies of sides they did support... and via the friend of my enemy is my enemy logic which is standard in politics... they became enemies.
Here someone is going to bitch at me like I had any part in any of these consequences.
Don't get mad at me. I didn't do anything one way or the other. All I'm doing is explaining what happened.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Even if the facts are true the bottom line is money trumps over common sense. They will be long buried before the shit hits the fan.
Funny, as it actually turned out, energy efficiency research for both electricity and transportation has worked very well, as have wind turbines and solar power. And quite a bit of that comes from DOE research.
Fusion reactor? Well, that's still 30 years away.
Of course the vast majority of DOE money is devoted to the nuclear weapons infrastructure and environmental cleanup from decades of nuclear weapon infrastructure.
For instance, take the FY 2012 budget of Los Alamos National lab.
http://www.lanl.gov/about/facts-figures/budget.php
What fraction would you say is on basic science? I expected 30%. More like 4%.
57% NNSA weapons
9% NNSA nonproliferation
7% NNSA 'safeguards and security'
7% work for national security (most likely intelligence agencies)
8% environmental cleanup
4% undefined 'work for others'
4% DOE Energy and Other Programs
4% DOE Office Of Science
The Republicans, who currently hold a majority in the US House, are the ones who voted to strip the science funding.
Saying "Congress" makes it sound bipartisan. It's only the Republicans.
Care to explain why carbon taxes are bad? Every economist I've read who acknowledges that there are negative externalities with burning carbon based fuels says that the most efficient and non-market distorting way to get the users to pay the cost of the externalities is to impose a carbon tax. Anything else distorts the market for carbon based fuels or you just let the general population bear the cost of the negative externalities irregardless of how the gains from use of the fuels are distributed.
"It was a horribly broken system that didn't work."
Quite the contrary. It worked quite well - emissions dropped 12% since it came into effect.
From the last time we had this discussion: http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
The 2010 fantasy novel Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory claims the second law of thermodynamics disproves the greenhouse effect. At first this seemed like a parody of creationists who claim the second law disproves evolution, but the Slayers seem very serious. They claim warm surfaces can't absorb back-radiation (*) from cold atmospheres because they mistakenly think heat can't be transferred from cold to warm objects at all. In fact, this is only true for net heat transfer. Cold objects can slow the rate at which warm objects lose heat without transferring more heat to warm objects than vice versa. That's how the greenhouse effect works.
(*) Also called downwelling longwave irradiance.
Again, Dr. Latour's Slayer fan fiction is fractally wrong:
Renewable energy and "sustainable transportation" were largely tried in the 19th century and abandoned because they were too limiting. This isn't the real future, this is what reactionary conservatives like yourself want to take us back to.
Wow, that's interesting, I would have described myself as a radical technologist. I think left and right politics have consistently failed to deliver the important structural changes our society needs to adapt and prosper. We devalue science and engineering and try to over-over simplify things when it's just not appropriate.
Instead of good quality debate we get low quality politicians driven by funding from corporate sources, and they want what they pay for. In reality I think that the alternative energy sources like wind, solar and geo-thermal are appropriate sources of technological development for the next 100 years while we get nuclear power engineered properly for the next 1000-5000 years. But that's close to impossible now because the debates about all of these things has become so polarized that people have forgotten things like compromise, wisdom, truth and fact.
And the science of anthropogenic global warming was reported right here at /. before it was trendy to talk about it. The debate was considerable different too, considering the merits of the science as opposed to how convincing the lobby groups are.
And alternative energy will mean an explosion of activity in IT to deploy control systems to manage energy. The cruel irony is countries like America and Australia are so abundantly rich with wind and solar resources that the future is practically begging us to lead the way, yet we choose to dig our heals in and forget that we used to do difficult things and solve hard problems.
You call me a conservative, but what does that mean any more? What does a liberal mean anymore? I like capitalism because when an idea is bad or has had it's turn, it collapses and something new takes over. Well the music industry is one of many examples that show us all that the vested interests CAN halt change, so what we have isn't capitalism at all, it's corporatism.
New ideas and thinking don't stand a chance against that sort of money.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The people writing the checks need to better understand that these scientists are the main reason that the US economy does as well as it does. We have had and to date maintain a significant advantage over other nation states in terms of our technological innovation. However, it is undeniable that other countries are fast catching up. Our technological advantage is not a given thing, we have to properly fund R&D for it to be maintained. Technological prowess leads to economic health.