This will appear as a comment in the Andy Revkin post on advice to Obamas and his science team
-gene Dear President Elect Obama: I note your choice of the words 'science' and 'technology' but you clearly mean ''science'. You define science as the search for truth, knowledge and greater understanding of the world around us. In your remarks you used the word engineering only once. In your choice of advisors you chose individuals who have no inexperience in engineering activity, especially engineering in industry, since their career activities are in science, and they have academic but no industrial experience. That is really a fatal failing because the goal is for the science to end up as products, techniques and capabilities that provide jobs, generate wealth, provide better educated citizens, improve health, improve the quality of life, and allow us to defend ourselves better. You can choose the order of importance; but they are all what we have been about. Though science plays a role it is only one term in the equation; one rung in the ladder to achieve our aspirations. You fail to understand that most of the technology and engineering that has made the U.S. prosperous, strong, and great has come out of industry NOT UNIVERSITIES AND NOT GOVERNMENT RESEARCH LABS; places like AT&T Bell Labs, IBM, RCA, GE, Westinghouse; Texas Instruments, Fairchild, Intel, Boeing, the Edison West Orange skunk works, and many others. So the successful model is to bring high tech industry back to the U.S., manufacturing, R&D and jobs. Accordingly, you should have on your team, probably as team leader, a highly qualified industrial manager who understands industry, especially manufacturing and R&D. The charter for that individual should be three fold: 1. Produce a plan that provides the incentive for industry to come back to U.S. shores, including manufacturing and R&D. With more high tech jobs available young people will turn to science and engineering education and forego finance and the law. The universities will manage without much help. 2. Establish means for helping seedling companies to get through the early stages. Today there is little investment available to early phase companies since venture capitalist no longer venture, and jumpstart investors don't jump. However, there are many individual investors who would invest if they had confidence in organizations that act to evaluate and provide advice; i.e., investment brokers. 3. Reproduce AT&T Bell Labs with the charter to serve as a not for profit, national skunk works for American industry. This is probably the easiest task. Don't worry so much about global warming. Yes, we need to eliminate fossil fuel use, especially oil and ultimately coal for many economic, strategic and climate reasons; there are many good reasons besides global warming for doing that. The CO2 that is in the atmosphere will remain for thousands of years. It is already too late to fix whatever damage has been done. Worry about saving the Arctic by funding research in geoengineering so that we can reverse the Arctic ice melt. That is feasible within your 8 year term. Doing anything about anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission is not. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
