This post in Science Progress got me thinking: I’m a scientist and I’ll probably become a billionaire in terms of research funding at some point in my soon-to-be illustrious career—especially in the environmental field with its overinflated glut of research money. I need to have a plan for what I would do with all of my money if/when I become a PI. Let’s just say I’ll pull in a conservative estimate of $135 Billion (coincidentally, that’s how much money our current administration asked for in supplemental funds for our war in Iraq).

Maybe I’d scrap my own research program and blow it all to fund the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science for the next 34 years. After all, scientists with hard hats were shown “cleaning up” nuclear waste on the cover of last week’s C&EN.

But seriously, look at those numbers. Due to the heavy bio-centric focus of NN lately, let me put this into terms you can understand: $135 billion dollars could fund ”335,593 additional average-sized NIH grants.”

How about it? How would you spend your $134 billion?

Hows that for a provocative title? ;)

Seriously though, all scientists would probably agree that their labs and/or equipment are huge energy hogs. Some groups are so wasteful that they produce several times the amount of waste per year than average Americans (lest we forget how wasteful we all are). Even computational groups that generate virtually no waste kick out a ton of energy by running their computer clusters all day and night. Hervé Philippe at the Université de Montréal calculated that his group produced 44 tonnes of CO2 last year, and that’s after he turned down numerous invitations to give international talks.

How productive is it for researchers to be kicking out all this CO2, especially if they’re studying global warming or biodiversity? At what point does it become futile? I’m not suggesting we all pack it in because frankly, I’d be without a job, but there is at the very least significant room for improvement. After all, if the scientists that are trying to influence all of these skeptics out there can’t curb their carbon footprints, then what hope is there for everyone else?

Luckily, there are a few things we can do. As previously discussed on Pete Jordan’s blog (here), traveling to scientific conferences accounts for a huge amount of carbon emissions. Virtual conferences and even social networking sites like NN could (and should) become more integral to the way in which science is communicated. There are other actions that scientists can take around the lab too, as outlined in a recent issue of Science:

Seven tips for making your lab more energy efficient
(From Science 318, 39-40; Oct 5, 2007)

• Close hood sashes and disable unused hoods
• Defrost freezers regularly
• Turn off equipment at night
• Borrow and lend used equipment
• Share surplus chemicals and use environmentally friendly reagents
• Request removal of unused light bulbs from ceiling fixtures
• Print on both sides

So how about it NN? Any other ideas or will being wasteful and pumped out massive quantities of CO2 just get tossed under the rationalization of another necessary evil for the sake of science?

We use ‘nano’ stuff in everything these days (as I’ve discussed earlier here). However, we still really don’t know what happens when this stuff eventually gets into our water, soil, and air. One very simple example published recently in Environmental Science & Technology (subscription required to see abstract here) demonstrated this point by showing that silver nanoparticles (used as antimicrobial agents) in socks can come off in fairly large quantities in the laundry. After getting flushed down your pipes, the nano-silver could then restrict the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants by killing necessary bacteria, among other consequences.

This study, among others, prompted several consumer groups to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban all products containing nano-silver until further research is conducted (see Washington Post article here).

I guess I am a little on the fence here on how I feel about strategies such as this that some may consider alarmist. On one side, I really think EPA needs to step up and address the fact that nanoparticles are different and may present different health/toxicity hazards than their larger-sized counterparts (i.e. nano-nonsense). But on the other hand, some nano-silver products are quite important, including those used in medicine. Banning all of them is certainly not the answer either. How do we as scientists (or goverments, funding agencies, etc) fill in the knowledge gaps without creating a backlash against nanotechnology? The Science Progress blog recently compared it to the backlash against genetically-modified foods. Funding projects that study the environmental impact of ‘nano’ stuff is certainly one place to start, but the U.S. has a ways to catch up. For example, in 2006 the U.S. only spent $13 million on studying the risks of nanotechnology whereas Europe spent $24 million. This will certainly need to go up (in both regions as well as other emerging nano-tech leaders in Asia) if we hope to balance the science with the backlash.

Image from here

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and contributor to the science blog The Intersection wrote an excellent piece on the state of the U.S. EPA here for Science Progress. I have written about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on here several times before (on ozone standards , nanotechnology and EPA politics), but this admittedly does a much better job—after all, he’s written two books!—framing what’s really going on with the EPA. I’d recommend anyone interested in the intersection between science, politics, and the environment to check it out.

... so I guess I hold off chucking all my garbage out the window of my moving vehicle until tomorrow.

Seriously though, why do people do this? I just can’t imagine the thought process that goes through someone’s mind in the preceding seconds before they send their empty McDonald’s cup sailing. It’s not even that these actions are terribly bad for the environment (in all reality, littering is very low on the totem poll), but it just looks terrible.

The May issue of Discover magazine came in my mail the other week (perhaps appropriately it arrived with the image of the Earth all torn up—see above) and I was excited by the ‘Better Planet Special Issue’ banner at the top of the cover. However, as I looked down just a bit further on the cover, I saw the headline: “How Science will heal the Earth.”

The Introduction to the special section was written by Laurie David, a climate activist (and co-producer of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth) who calls for a “complete shift in consciousness” regarding global change. She says the decisions we as a human race will have to make will be difficult and the consequences will not be easy to take. But, she goes on to say, we should act on the knowledge that these hard decisions today will make things much less worse for the future.

Those are points that I generally agree with but that’s where the dialogue stopped. The magazine then goes into ‘science will save us’ mode, completely contradicting what that author of the forward is calling for. The articles are well written and focus on important topics, but how will developing better technologies for energy, food, water, air, and conservation help aid a complete shift in consciousness? Granted these technologies are important, and as someone working loosely in these fields, I hope there remains a continued push in these directions, but as I’ve argued previously on Nature Network, there should be focus on the ‘people’ part of the solution too, even by scientists. I suspect the cover was an attempt to be provocative by the editors of Discover but what kind of message does this send to non-scientists? Think of the millions of people that will see the cover in grocery stores, airports, and bookstores.

I promised I was going on hiatus a couple weeks ago until I defend my PhD (which remains only six days away!), but this is something that was really bothering me. How can science really heal the Earth? There is no silver bullet waiting out there, no matter how hard scientists and engineers look for it, if we continue to live in a world that values unmitigated consumption, growth, etc. These types of headlines allow people to put too much faith into science and become complacent, waiting for a solution to come to them as opposed to actually doing something.

So, that’s what I think, but I want to pose this question to any readers out there: Do you think science can save the Earth?

So… I defend my Ph.D in less than a month. I still need to finish analyzing data for my last chapter (and write it up). On top of that, I have two trips between now and then, one of which is the Spring ACS meeting. I’ve been trying to keep up with this blog thing in the past few weeks, but it isn’t working. Therefore, I’m officially taking a break. Now I don’t feel so bad about not posting semi-regularly.

Almost there…

There’s an excellent post today by Andrew Revkin at the New York Times on his Dot Earth blog about receding glaciers in Switzerland. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in global warming or the environment. This is important stuff here, and it’s not always about the science; there’s a human side too.

Perhaps my next vacation should be to visit a glacier or two. After all, who knows how long they’ll be around? Maybe here?

One of my labmates sent me this article from the Washington Post this morning, but I didn’t consider really commenting on it until I saw the same story as a headline on the BBC’s webpage here.

I don’t want this blog to become a archive for a scientist’s continual complaints about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but it seems like that’s what’s happening (see here and here).

This time, the EPA has claimed to have created the “most stringent” ozone standard ever for cities. That may be true, but a look at the numbers suggests they could have done a lot more. In fact, if they listened to the unanimous advice of their scientific advisors, the standard would have been dropped even lower. The scientists suggested 60 parts per billion (ppb) (and nothing higher than 70 ppb) from the standard set 10 years ago which was at 84 ppb. In all their infinite wisdom, the EPA lowered it to… 75 ppb. Why not just lower it to 65 ppb and say that you’re listening to scientists and looking out for human health too? Because industry lobbyists fought tooth and nail against the tighter restrictions to save money, even claiming that there is no scientific basis that ozone is a health risk (for those that don’t know, ozone is the nasty stuff that makes smog and causes severe health problems or worse for millions of city-dwellers—that’s in contrast the the good ozone that’s protecting us from UV radiation in the upper atmosphere).

And the cherry on top is that, as the Clean Air Act is written, the EPA is not supposed to factor in cost for the health standards they set, but the Bush-appointed administrator wants to change that too. I guess if that happened, it would provide some justification for not meeting scientific recommendations. As it is now, they’re just completely ignoring them.

Okay, that’s enough, I promise not to post about the EPA for a while…

John McCain, the U.S. republican presidential nominee, thinks so. One of his primary agendas if he were to (astonishingly) take office is he would reduce ‘superfluous’ spending by the government. One example he repeatedly highlights is $3 million USD spent by the U.S. Geological Survey to survey grizzly bear populations in the Rockies. The scientists are using DNA collected from hair samples to get accurate counts.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a recent Washington Post article on the subject”

If you’ve heard Sen. John McCain’s stump speech, you’ve surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal,” he jokes, “but it was a waste of money.”

I think he watches a bit too much CSI. Imagine if he knew how much money the government spends daily to clean up remnants of their nuclear weapons facilities during WWII (hint: it’s more than the entire bear project costs) or how much the yearly NSF budget is, which doesn’t get funded enough as it is. I can only imagine what will happen to science funding if McCain takes office.