Washington Post columnists urge technoscience themes for President Obama
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0136
On 30 November, two Washington Post columnists prescribed science-related foci for imminent major presidential speeches. According to Eugene Robinson, ‘President Obama should devote his next State of the Union address to climate change.’ According to David Ignatius, the president should prepare for his January inaugural address by pondering an MIT Technology Review article calling for boosting national ambitions, research budgets, and willingness to take risks.
Robinson bases his column ‘Is this the planet we want to leave behind? ’ on news from the new round of United Nations climate talks in Doha, Qatar, and on the new World Bank report Turn Down the Heat . He warns of ‘unprecedented heat waves,’ ‘severe drought,’ a ‘parboiled planet,’ a ‘beyond bleak’ temperature-rise outlook, and sea-level rise adding another three feet to the flooding caused by hurricanes such as Sandy. For poorer countries, he predicts ‘lower crop yields, possible water shortages and stressed ecosystems,’ more malaria thanks to widened scope for mosquitoes, worsened poverty, and general chaos.
The US is only a part of a world climate-negligence problem, Robinson believes, and therefore must become ‘fully involved.’ For the president to convince Americans that the threat is real, he concludes, ‘would be a great accomplishment—and perhaps the most important legacy of his second term.’
Ignatius bases his column ‘Think big, Mr. President ’ on ‘Why we can’t solve big problems ’ by Jason Pontin in MIT Technology Review. Ignatius laments that the sense of awe from the Apollo Moon-landing era ‘has diminished, if not disappeared.’ He quotes Pontin’s assertion that ‘big problems that people had imagined technology would solve, such as hunger, poverty, malaria, climate change, cancer, and the diseases of old age, have come to seem intractably hard.’ Then he reports and echoes Pontin’s point that ‘these big problems are, in fact, solvable.’ Ignatius writes:
The MIT review gathers a series of manifestos for big-think ideas that are feasible, now. The list includes plans for: carbon capture to slow climate change; genomic medicine to target the array of cellular malfunctions that go under the heading of ‘cancer'; solar grids to bring electricity to the world’s poorest people; robotic manufacturing and online education to mass produce knowledge and good engineering techniques; a new assault on Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia; and, yes, a mission to Mars.
Still echoing Pontin, Ignatius condemns a stark decline in R&D spending and a ‘second, more interesting’ problem, ‘a tendency among venture capitalists and other investors to look for small tweaks rather than big, disruptive technology breakthroughs.’
Ignatius stipulates that the president ‘hasn’t shown the quality of sustained, strategic leadership that would make him a transformational president.’ Nevertheless the columnist expresses hope that the president will now focus on ‘economic and technological mastery’ and begin to ‘make a difference in setting expectations about the future.’
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.