Commentaries settle down as McCain misses a cue in Florida — week of 19 October 2008

As the presidential campaign entered the final 10 days before the end of the election, both candidates have been repeating their main stump points related to science and education, either in speeches or through surrogates in organized debate forums.

Despite this repetition, there were some breaking developments. On 17 October, John McCain, like Barack Obama, promised an additional $2 billion over five years for the space shuttle replacement program called Constellation that would take astronauts to the Moon and Mars. “My friends, we just saw the Chinese. We saw them in space,” McCain told an afternoon rally of about 2,000 people in Melbourne, Florida. “We’ve got competition. We’ve got to stay ahead. We will be the first nation to Mars.” However, in the same speech, he told the crowd that he would freeze funding for the federal budget at 2008 levels.

The Obama campaign pounced on McCain’s plan to freeze the federal budget by pointing out to Floridians what the impact would be on NASA’s budget: fewer jobs in the region. In a radio ad and conference call with reporters , Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) said McCain “wants to freeze NASA spending at last year’s level ...So layoffs would loom larger, and NASA would continue to be starved of funds for future exploration.”

McCain had one opportunity to try to limit the damage when he visited Ormond Beach, Florida, on Thursday. Instead, the candidate glossed over NASA in his spending freeze, stating that only programs such as “defense, veterans care, social security and health care” would be exempt from the freeze. McCain reinitiated his pledge to “veto every single pork barrel earmark.” Congress added earmarks worth $2.1 billion to NASA’s 2009 budget last week, including an extra flight of the space shuttle to deliver AMS-2 to the International Space Station, a project that would keep hundreds, if not thousands, of NASA-related jobs in the region for another two to three years.

Obama’s Florida policy director Ian Bassin was quick to respond, “It seems Senator McCain isn’t committed to exempting NASA from his proposed spending freeze. After talking about space for all of 53 seconds in Melbourne last week, now he’s returned to the area and neglected to mention space at all, going so far as to reinstitute his spending freeze pledge without a NASA exception. It’s no wonder Florida Today [in a June editorial] called McCain ‘downright schizophrenic’ about space,” he said. “Barack Obama has pledged an additional $2 billion to reduce the spaceflight gap and save Florida jobs and was recently praised for his ‘leadership’ on space issues by NASA administrator Michael Griffin. That’s the change Florida’s Space Coast needs.”

Obama also released a statement after India launched its first unmanned spacecraft . “We are reminded just how urgently the United States must revitalize its space program if we are to remain the undisputed leader in space, science, and technology,” the statement said. “My comprehensive plan to revitalize the space program and close the gap between the Space Shuttle’s retirement and its next-generation replacement includes $2 billion more for NASA - but more money alone is not enough. We must not only retain our space workforce so that we don’t let other countries surpass our technical capabilities; we must train new scientists and engineers for the next generation.... It’s time for a space program that inspires our children again. As President, I will lead our space program boldly into the 21st Century - so when my daughters, and all our children, look up to the skies, they see Americans leading the way into the deepest reaches of our solar system.”

Advice for the 44th president

Science magazine looked at 10 scientific issues that it hopes the next president will make informed decisions on. The topics include regulating CO², revitalizing polar research in light of melting polar icecaps, rationalizing NASA planetary missions to exploit upcoming flyby opportunities, devising a more comprehensive strategy for nanotechnology, improving US reliability in international scientific collaborations, and deciding whether to develop a new nuclear warhead as the workforce at the nuclear weapons labs is streamlined.

Both candidates have a strong record in the Senate, says Popular Science magazine, in supporting science and scientific integrity . “Ultimately, the question isn’t which candidate will fund more research, but what research will they fund?” states the magazine.

Earlier this week, the Center for Science, Technology and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota held a conference on innovation which forms the basis of the bipartisan America COMPETES Act. The act calls for the doubling of the science budget among other items. The COMPETES funding “is a train wreck,” said Russell Lefevre, president of the IEEE, at the conference . The act passed Congress but was not funded at the requested levels, he said, and it is unlikely to be so with the current stress on the US budget. The budget deficit for 2009 could be over a trillion dollars, said Kei Koizumi , who runs the American Association for the Advancement of Science budget office. This could be the fifth year in a row that overall federal R&D funding declined in real terms.

Computerworld recently asked nine high-tech luminaries to offer their advice to the next US president. “In difficult times, when multiple near-term priorities draw heavily on limited resources, it is all too easy to curtail research investments and associated technology development,” says former DARPA manager Robert Kahn. “This would likely shortchange our future generations. The next president should firmly resist that possibility,” he adds.

Climate change for goverment policies?

Both McCain and Obama agree that the Bush administration’s policies on global warming are far too weak . The candidates differ, however, on how to combat it. New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin interviews a number of environmentalists and energy analysts to see what they think of the candidates’ plans, while Rich Kassel, in the Gotham Gazette, emphasizes NASA scientist James Hansen’s warning to both candidates that time to combat climate change is running out .

Van Jones, the author of The Green Collar Economy, publicly criticized McCain as the vanguard of a new movement with an environmental veneer but bad intentions. “The climate deniers got chased out of town, but in their place you’ve got the rise of the Dirty Greens,” he said in a recent interview. These are “people saying ‘I’m for solar, wind, geothermal, but I’m also for tar sands, coastal drilling.’ ”

Energy independence

New York Times reporter Jim Motavalli interviewed analysts in the auto industry to see whether the candidates’ plans to develop plug-in hybrid cars to reduce CO² emissions are realistic. As David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, tells Motavalli, the key technology to make plug-in hybrids realistic is better batteries. Charles Territo, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, agrees and cautions that “it took 10 years for one million hybrid electric vehicles to be sold worldwide.... A target of one million plug-ins in the U.S. by 2015 — considering there are none now — could be somewhat optimistic. But it doesn’t mean the industry isn’t going to try.”

New nuclear power plants?

The nuclear industry is also slowly seeing an uptick that could result in more high-paying jobs, particularly if McCain’s proposal to build 45 reactors by 2030 gets approval. According to US News and World Report, Shaw Group Inc. and nuclear reactor builder Westinghouse will shortly complete a facility in Louisiana . It will produce large prefabricated nuclear components that will reduce the cost of building new reactors. In a study, Louisiana State University researchers estimate that the new facility could produce about 9000 jobs over the next 15 years and potentially several billion dollars in earnings.

The latest report from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission states that 21 companies say they will seek permission to build 34 power plants over the next 10 years, but only 10 proposals actually have funding to go through the NRC process, and the first two are now not expected to come online until 2014. But as Daniel B. Botkin in the International Herald Tribune asked earlier this week, to what extent can nuclear power really help achieve US energy independence ? And columnist Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times claims McCain’s proposal has a “bold glow of deception” . Reason magazine also looks at the issue by inviting Shikha Dalmia (a senior analyst at Reason Foundation), nuclear energy journalist William Tucker, and Jerry Taylor to assess the candidates’ plans for the industry .

The last full week of campaigning starts tomorrow, and as this week has shown, science policies are still a major factor in attracting swing voters.

Paul Guinnessy