Many institutions throughout the country (including those close to CHF’s Philadelphia home) offer scientific programming to the general public. There are museums, science cafes, podcasts, and more. And yet a fundamental question remains in the midst of all this programming: do people have a basic understanding of what science is?

Institutions offering scientific programming cannot assume that their audience, no matter what age or level of education, has a solid understanding of the scientific process. The continued debates about teaching evolution and Creationism side-by-side highlight a national need to educate citizens about the definition and meaning of science.

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University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and public television’s Nightly Business Report recently completed a project that identified the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years. Viewers of the program were encouraged to submit nominations. A panel of eight Wharton staff members with specialties in management, technology, finance, and ethics narrowed the number to 30 and then ranked them.

Key criteria in assigning the rankings included

• Did the innovation have a material effect in improving quality of life?
• Did it address a compelling need?
• Did it change the way business is conducted?
• Did it spark an ongoing stream of new innovations?

Given the audience and the backgrounds of the judges, a strong business perspective was evident. Nevertheless, some broader trends were evident.

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Many expected that when President Obama took office, one of his first moves would be writing an executive order to reverse the previous administration’s ban on stem-cell research. Nearly a month into Obama’s term his senior adviser David Axelrod told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, “We’re going to be doing something on that soon, I think.” (See the video below, at 4:03.)

Not exactly the sweeping pronouncement people have been waiting for, but a comforting reminder that the issue is still inside the Obama administration’s radar.

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When a new power plant is proposed, when a chemical plant expands, or when a government agency holds a hearing to deliberate a siting or permitting decision, a notice has to be published in the local newspaper. The notice gives members of the public the opportunity to submit comments, to participate in scheduled hearings, or even to organize for or against a proposed action.*  

But with the rise of the Internet, states are considering legislation that would eliminate that requirement. If legislation proposed in Arizona and South Dakota goes through, government agencies there would be allowed to put public notices up on their Web sites instead of publishing them in local newspapers.  

The proposed move from newspaper notification to Internet-only notification has been criticized on a number of grounds. (Writer Le Templar summarizes some of these criticisms in his interview with NPR’s On the Media.) Public notices that do not appear in print could be too easily changed, and an Internet-only system would be extremely difficult to police. However, what Templar and other critics have not mentioned are the legislation’s potential consequences for the environment and especially for the citizens most affected by pollution. 

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With the global economy in a downturn, it’s easy to ignore the long-term environmental impact of our actions for the sake of pinching pennies. So what does that mean for the renewable-energy sector? Take wind energy, for instance, which is one of the few renewable resources that is close to achieving grid parity (along with solar energy). Grid parity occurs when an alternative-energy source has achieved the same cost of power generation as fossil fuels. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Energy has published a report detailing the possible scenario of having 20% of the country’s energy generated by wind power by 2030. But the report states that while technically possible, realizing this goal would require a substantial national effort.

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The media buzzed last week with the news that climate change is, for all intents and purposes, irreversible. At least that was the word being broadcast by NPR (citing new reports in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science). And it was definitely the theme of the newer, even scarier presentation Al Gore took to the U.S. Senate.

But for those of us who have been paying attention, this didn’t really pass for news. The recent symposium hosted by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation featured several prominent chemists who spoke not to the debate about whether there will be change but to the discussion about the extent to which it will occur and what can be done in the near term to prepare ourselves. Scientists in the know have been saying for years that the geological timeframe that must be considered when thinking about both change and mitigation is just that-geological, not human. Perhaps the real headline this week is that climate scientists finally got their message out to the public: adapt-because change is coming.

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