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U.S. releases latest Climate Change Strategic Plan |
The Bush Administration has just released a Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan. According to the press release the Plan "details measures to accelerate the development and reduce the cost of new and advanced technologies that avoid, reduce, or capture and store greenhouse gas emissions". While the overall scope of this effort is laudable and many of the separate elements are certainly worth pursuing, the general approach is to deceive the public by making it appear as though there were some kind of concerted U.S. effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
The normal approach to strategic planning would be to identify the problem and then prioritize the approaches to solving the problem. Instead what we have here is a patchwork of programs which were being pursued for many other reasons and which could have an important impact on future climate conditions. And even the programs that are described may be relegated to the unfunded mandates category that is so prominently a feature of this government. While the current Fusion Energy Sciences Program is described as part of this Plan, the actual timescales for carrying out the necessary research are vague or nonexistent.
The entire report is available at the Climate Technology website . The curious reader might want to compare this plan with the recent policy speech by Al Gore at New York University. Gore advocates a more aggressive approach to dealing with climate change.
“… we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.”
It is precisely this last concern that must be kept in mind when looking at this shiny new strategic plan. It is a necessary step but far from sufficient to solving the challenge that we face in climate change. And the resources that might be used to address the needs of this plan are being dissipated fighting a needless conflict in Iraq — jw
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The U.S. Oil Addiction |
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Physicists Persevere in Quest |
Physicists persevere in quest for inexhaustible energy source
University of Wisconsin - May 30, 2006
MADISON - As gas prices soar and greenhouse gases continue to blanket the atmosphere, the need for a  clean, safe and cheap source of energy has never seemed more pressing.
Scientists have long worked to meet that need, exploring alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar power. But, after decades of quiet progress, the spotlight is now on another potentially inexhaustible energy source.
Seven countries signed an agreement in Brussels last week (May 24) to launch construction of the multibillion dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France. The largest fusion-energy experiment ever conducted, ITER is the culmination of years of research by scores of scientists, and is poised to answer long-standing questions about the real-world viability of fusion energy. The United States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation are joint sponsors of the project, which will experimentally generate up to 500 million watts of energy.
An international collective of physicists and engineers is working to both complement and lend expertise directly to the ITER initiative - and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are firmly placed among them.
"[ITER] is a major threshold that we've been waiting to get to for 20 years," says Raymond Fonck, a UW-Madison professor of engineering physics and the chief scientist of ITER's U.S. project office. "The project is the No. 1 priority in fusion research in the country and the world, and essentially takes us to a regime we've never been to before."
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