Bush and Science

As many of you know, I’m a strong supporter of our President on many issues, most especially on defense, foreign policy, and the war on terror. But there are also many areas of policy and ideology where I am not a Bush supporter — and one of them is in the area of science and technology.

One of my readers (Larry E. — thanks!) pointed me to this article (in the NY Times, sorry) that highlights some of the problems I have with Bush’s science and technology policy (in this case, with NASA).

This particular article describes a pattern of behavior and effects that, taken all together, are rather disturbing to anyone who thinks of themselves as a rationalist. The pattern implies that the administration believes in magical thinking, and doesn’t understand (or accept) findings made by the scientific process. This is, of course, a common phenomenon with people who are devoutly religious. I carefully said “common” there, because it is certainly not universal. Devoutly religious scientists are particularly interesting in this regard; many of them can simultaneously defend both the scientific process and their religion.

Unfortunately, the current administration does not seem to share this capability. Sometimes their missteps in science and technology policy can be traced back to this science-versus-magical-thinking issue (the Deutsch memo discussed in the article is a great example of this). Sometimes it can be traced back to politics, such as the administration’s support for expanded manned space flight, including a return to the moon and an objective of a manned mission to Mars. In general, I find the Bush administration’s science and technology policies (and the resulting budget requests) very disappointing.

In the recent State of the Union speech, Bush outlined an energy plan that reflects muddled thinking and (I suspect) a belief in magic. Really only one element is something I can find some hope in: builing nuclear power plants. As an example of the problems with the rest, consider his ethanol initiative: he’d like to see us use ethanol to help displace foreign oil. The ethanol would be made not only from corn, but also from other bio-material, such as wood chips. Sounds great, makes all the greenies happy, but … the underlying science says there are lots of problems with this approach. The biggest problem is that it takes almost a gallon of oil to produce the ethanol that would replace a gallon of oil. And that’s the most optimistic assessment I could find — most scientists believe that ethanol will take even more oil! Now we can hope for a scientific breakthrough, or we can believe in magic — but it strikes me as sheer folly to start a major program, spending billions of dollars, on that basis. I could support a program to search for that breakthrough, but that’s not what’s on the table…

Well, this is a sort of rambly post, isn’t it? I really just wanted to make the point about where President Bush and I part company: science and technology policies is one of the main ones.

Some other day I’ll dig into another one: immigration and border control.