Archive for December 16, 2008

Obama’s Energy and Environmental Teams: Make Room for Science!

Based on the gobbledygook and denialism on energy and the environment that has come out of W’s White House, I thought the scientific method was permanently relegated to fourth-grade science projects, most of which are better reasoned than, say, the White House’s position on carbon emissions.

With Obama’s introduction of his energy and environmental teams, yesterday, it is clear science … and reasoning … and research … and development are all coming back to the federal government in a big way. Of course, there is a great deal of work to be done: building coalitions with private industry, funding research of new energies (how to harnass, how to deliver), devising international agreements to protect the environment, cleaning up the gargantuan mess left by a century of industrial development.

Obama has put together a team that can face these challenges.

First, Dr. Steven Chu, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, is a Nobel-prize winning physicist who is the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and who is very vocal about climate protection. He also is the lead on a huge solar and biofuel research project between UC Berkeley, British Petroleum, Lawrence Berkeley, and the Univerisity of Illinois.

Since initially announced in 2006, there has been controversy surrounding the partnership between UC Berkeley and British Petroleum, that cooperation would dilute academic integrity. I understand the fear, but I also understand the desperate need we have to unite private industry and academic research. Academia needs to learn how to incorporate the realities of the modern economy in research models, and private industry needs to learn how not to summarily dismiss science that threatens even to minimally eat into profit margin. I hope, too, Chu’s biofuel research produces policy that looks far beyond the simple answer of replacing food crops with fuel crops.

Second, Obama created a new position for Carol Browner: White House Coordinator for Energy and Climate. Yes, the loathed “czar” word has been attached to the position. Nonetheless, Browner served as EPA administrator through both Clinton Administrations, and successfully fought off several Republican attempts to erode environmental protections. Apparently, she is a tough nut and can get results.

Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, and his chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley, will report to Browner. There is concern about Jackson’s effectiveness, based on constituent dissatisfaction regarding her administration of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Some say she did the best she could under Governor Corzine, who has taken some controversial stands (or, sometimes, NON-stands) on state environmental issues. (If any readers can comment in more detail about New Jersey’s situation, please do not hesitate to do so.) I hope reporting to a former EPA head will help Jackson — a chemical engineer — find success at the federal level.

Nancy Sutley is Deputy Mayor for Energy and the Environment in Los Angeles, and she represents the Mayor’s Office on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (The importance and power of the Water District cannot be overstated. Think Chinatown, minus the murder and incest.) As chairwoman of the Council on Environmental Quality, Sutley must clean up the council’s image as a staging area for Big Oil and other chemical- and energy-industry lobbyists to assemble their wishlists for granting by the Bush Administration.

Certainly Chu, Browner, Jackson, and Sutley more than meet minimum criteria we can expect from energy and environmental leaders, and I am hopeful this team can establish a solid foundation of renewable-energy R&D and stringent climate-protection priorities that do not alienate business. Yes, I do believe this is possible.

The Hospital Scene

Why is this just getting to Digg? No matter:

It is one of the darkly iconic scenes of the Bush Administration. In March 2004, two of the president’s most senior advisers rushed to a Washington hospital room where they confronted a bedridden John Ashcroft. White House chief of staff Andy Card and counsel Alberto Gonzales pressured the attorney general to renew a massive domestic-spying program that would lapse in a matter of days. But others hurried to the hospital room, too. Ashcroft’s deputy, James Comey, later joined by FBI Director Robert Mueller, stood over Ashcroft’s bed to make sure the White House aides didn’t coax their drugged and bleary colleague into signing something unwittingly. The attorney general, sick and pain-racked from a rare pancreatic disease, rose up from his bed, gathering what little strength he had, and firmly told the president’s emissaries that he would not sign their papers.

Read the book.

This is a story that’s been told and retold, but I’m still glad to see it resurface. Here’re the fuller facts, some omitted from Newsweek’s story:

During his term as director of the Office of Legal Counsel, the office that interprets how (or, under Cheney & Addington, “if”) the law applies to the executive branch, Jack Goldsmith displayed a trait most unwelcome in the Bush administration: a spine. Despite being a true believer in the whole “unitary executive” theory, and likely okaying more invasions of American privacy than you can shake a stick at, Goldsmith singlehandedly rebuked the White House for engaging in torture and, mere months later, engineered a palace coup over Bush’s implementation of the “Terror Surveillance Program,” a scheme that circumvented the generous provisions of FISA by implementing a warrantless surveillance against even domestic Americans, upon nothing more than the Vice President’s say-so. That’s right: even the secret FISA court wasn’t secret enough for Bush’s buddies, and over the course of a few months, Goldsmith indicated his displeasure with the program repeatedly, promising to refuse to re-authorize it.

This all came to a head, of course, in the “Hospital Scene,” described above, where Bush’s Department of Justice, oddly, became the good guys, the lesser of two evils, arrayed against the White House in a last-ditch attempt by the bedside of an ailing man to provide some meaning for the “rule of law.” Justice (the department) won – the program was revamped before being reauthorized – but in the long run, of course, Justice (the concept) lost.

Strange, sad, surreal story, yes. But here’s the kicker. Bush knew nothing about it until the next day. And, although this all happened months before Election Day 2004, the American people were to remain in the dark for a full year after they’d cast their ballots.