As the stock market reaches another low, the scientific community is starting to query the short-term plans of the approaching Obama administration. Will Barack Obama maintain his commitment to high investment in energy efficiency and new renewable energy technologies in his first term? What will he do about climate change? What impact will Obama's new policy advisers have in the START negotiations with Russia to reduce nuclear warheads and improve the security at nuclear weapons installations? What will he do about Iran's enrichment program? And will he provide extra support to universities as state budget cuts and significant declines in the endowment portfolios of private universities are causing hiring and salary freezes?
Some of these questions were answered on Thursday when Obama addressed a global warming summit in California via video. The summit was attended by some 600 state and international officials. The address was clearly timed to influence the December 1-12 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which has as one of its goals to renew and extend the Kyoto Protocol agreement by December 2009. Obama says in the video that he will not attend the Poznan meeting "because the United States has only ... one president at a time."
Obama also made clear, however, that there will be a change in tactics under his administration. "Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change," he said. "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear....Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."
Obama confirmed that the US would once again accept international targets to reduce its own CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions. "We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050," he said.
Obama added in his speech that he is committed to pumping $150 billion into the economy to cut oil consumption dramatically and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, partly through increasing automobile efficiency and partly by closing down coal-fired power plants or adapting them to clean-coal technologies.
Transition news
As Obama publicly spells out some of the policy changes to expect, the new transition teams are busy quietly evaluating the ways in which the president-elect's goals can be implemented. To do so, individuals close to Obama's transition team met with members of the American Physical Society's energy efficiency study group on Tuesday to discuss their recent report that laid out a roadmap and some scientific limitations on energy efficiency. The transition teams have also been talking to former members of the Clinton administration who have close links to Iran and Russia, to find out ways in which diplomatic pressure can be applied.
According to the transition website, 1995 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Mario Molina of the University of California, San Diego, and former White House science and technology official Thomas Kalil will review the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Earlier this year Kalil said that the next president must restore "integrity to US science and technology policy so that decisions are made on the basis of facts and not ideology."
Under Tom Wheeler's direction in the working group association with science and technology (see last week's report), Lori Garver, the president of Capital Space, LLC, a consulting firm with deep ties to the space community, will be reviewing NASA along with industrial analyst Roderic Olvera Young. Garver argued for more support for NASA during the election, and previously advised the Clinton campaign in the primaries.
Former vice president Al Gore's domestic policy adviser Jim Kohlenberger and telecommunications lawyer Henry M. Rivera will be leading a review of the National Science Foundation.
The group associated with assessing the US Department of Energy will be led by Elgie Holstein, a senior energy policy adviser to the Obama campaign. Holstein was the associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science at the Office of Management & Budget and chief of staff at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.
Holstein will be joined by consultant Elizabeth Montoya, who was previously deputy chief of staff at the Department of Energy, and analyst Sue Tierney, who previously served as assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Energy, under President Clinton.
Paul Guinnessy
