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March 15, 2005
Science (Should) Trump Politics
Houston Chronicle writer Lynn J. Cook today interviewed Amy Myers Jaffe, the energy fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute of Public Policy. Some interesting points:
Q: You believe spending on solar could actually commercialize it. Why?
A: With solar, whatever you take out of the atmosphere you've taken out, but there's no waste. There are no corollary issues. Politicians say solar would take too much space, but did you know to electrify the entire United States through solar panels it would take less land than we are using right now to grow corn for ethanol? And don't forget it takes diesel to run the farm equipment to plant the corn.
You have to look carefully at the science behind this stuff. Hydrogen is the perfect example. If we are going to use natural gas to create hydrogen to power cars, we need to know what the implications are. Where's this stuff coming from? Given the limitations of our own domestic resource base, we're going to have to import it and — bingo — we're back to OPEC. And what's the point of building an entire hydrogen infrastructure derived from natural gas when the whole idea behind it is to diversify from the Middle East?
Q: Energy issues are tough to understand. Do politicians get it?
A: Energy is too complicated for most politicians to understand, so they go with constituent-related positions that might not be well-informed on all aspects. [...]
President Bush's position is for more drilling access offshore — but not in Florida, his brother's state. Think about this: We had the worst hurricane we've ever had in the history of the oil industry, Hurricane Ivan. Underwater mudslides wrecked pipelines, the tops of rigs with no GPS systems on them were floating around lost for weeks. It took months to get production back on line. This was the largest crisis in energy infrastructure in the United States, and there were no pollution consequences at all.
We have politicians sitting on the Hill saying we can't drill off Florida or North Carolina because if a giant hurricane hit, we'd have terrible pollution. But one did hit, and it didn't happen.
Q: What would you like to see the government do differently?
A: We're actually cutting spending on science in the current budget. We need real breakthroughs, and $1 billion a year isn't going to get us there by 2050.
As Americans, we need to understand how these things come about. Take Japanese cars. We can buy them, get better mileage, have fewer emissions, and they're still convenient. The reason we can do that is because the Japanese government subsidized the research that went into those cars.
Japanese industry benefited, and jobs were created from the export market. The U.S. doesn't have that.
I get worried whenever politic and "constituent-service" outweighs conclusions based on good science. I guess that's why I worry a lot. Her point about solar power was (good) news to me--and how idiotic is it to spend billions on hydrogen research, when the source of the hydrogen is...natural gas?
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