Volcanic response to Jindal’s speech; good news for science in stimulus bill; EPA takes another look at air pollution; and is the US still competitive in R&D?

The value of volcanic monitoring

More than a year ago, in a presidential campaign TV ad critical of a Congress that was “spending like a drunken sailor,” then presidential candidate John McCain singled out a solid scientific study of bear DNA in Montana as an example of the wild spending. The bear DNA project, as it turned out, was a unique and efficient way to determine the size of the state’s grizzly bear population, and McCain was hammered by scientists for singling out the research .

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, while giving the Republican response to President Obama’s 24 February speech before Congress , did McCain one better. Jindal, giving examples of what he thought was wasteful spending in the nearly $800 billion stimulus package, went after "$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’” Instead of monitoring volcanoes, “what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington,” Jindal said. In articles in the Washington Post and the Daily Beast scientists responded with significant heat.

“I would give the honorable governor poor marks for his education,” Mark Brandon, a geologist at Yale, said in the Daily Beast article. “Volcanic monitoring right now is absolutely essential for protecting lives and property.”

David Applegate, the US Geological Survey’s senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards, told the Washington Post the money will provide for upgrades of seismic monitoring equipment that is too slow in providing information. “One of our big statutory mandates is to deliver robust information on landslides, and one of the biggest challenges we’ve got is that a lot of our aging equipment isn’t able to deliver information in real time,” he said. The stimulus money “is a big shot in the arm in terms of our ability to monitor these networks.”

Some scientists and cable TV commentators have wondered aloud if Jindal would have had the same reaction had the money been aimed at “hurricane monitoring” instead of volcanoes.

A science stimulus

Other than Jindal’s misstep into volcanology, the science news that dominated the week came from the release of the fiscal year 2009 budget and the concurrent release of the blueprint for the 2010 budget. The federal budgets have been mired in partisan bickering for the last few years of the Bush administration, and now the 2008 continuing resolution is bumping into both the draft of the 2009 budget and Obama’s 2010 budget proposal.

The 2010 document was just a blueprint, but 2009 has numbers. The American Association for the Advancement of Science analysis of the 2009 budget, adjusted to take out overhead and administrative costs, is widely regarded as the most realistic and accurate projection of numbers available anywhere. AAAS budget analyst Kei Koizumi has been so good at analyzing the federal numbers that he has just taken a job as assistant director for federal research and development at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Breakdowns of the budget numbers can also be found on Physics Today’s partner website FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News.

In sum, the budget numbers for science were decent, which was good coming on the heels of the huge boost in science spending that came last week in the stimulus package. The National Institutes of Health gets a 3% increase for 2009, NSF gets 7%, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science gets a huge boost of 20%.

A federal appeals court told the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its standards on pollutants. The ruling, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, said that the Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decision-making.” A lawyer for Earthjustice said the decision was “a victory for the breathing public.”

The Obama administration is also considering new national rules for regulating greenhouse gas emissions for the transportation sector. Administration officials were meeting with car companies, environmental groups, and representatives from California, which has the toughest emission standards in the country. “The hope across the administration is that we can have a unified national policy when it comes to cleaner vehicles,” Carol Browner, assistant to Obama for energy and climate, was quoted as saying in a Washington Post article .

While Browner was concentrating on vehicle emission standards, representatives from 140 countries gathered in Washington to commit to an agreement to reduce global mercury pollution. The agreement, according to the Environmental News Network, was “propelled by the United States’ reversal in policy, which also influenced policy reversal for other countries, including China and India.” Susan Egan Keane, a policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council, said the agreement was “great news for reducing mercury pollution around the world, and shows a commitment from the Obama administration to international environmental issues.”

In the midst of the celebrations at the offices of various environmental organizations in Washington, however, came another story from the Environmental News Network titled “The Climate Change Lobby Explosion .” The article said that a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms shows “that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year.” That number, the article notes, is an increase of more than 300% over the number of climate change lobbyists five years ago. Lobbying expenditures on the issue last year, the center estimates, were more than $90 million.

As the lobbyists jockeyed for office space on K Street, word was leaking out from administration officials that Obama’s third pick for the secretary of commerce job would be former Washington State governor Gary Locke. Locke “would bring to the position a strong expertise in business relations with China, knowledge of the clean energy sector, and a familiarity with the high tech industry,” according to a report in CNET News.

Locke would come into the job just as a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reveals that the competitive edge of the US economy has eroded sharply over the last decade. The report, covered in a New York Times article , said the US ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness. Worse, the American economy placed last in terms of progress made over the last decade. The report disagrees with a Rand Corporation paper of last year that said the US was in “no imminent danger” of losing its competitive advantage in science and technology.

Jim Dawson