The US Science Budget Evokes the Interest of the New York Times. (December 7, 2004)

    On Sunday Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times, "If President Bush is looking for a legacy [to leave Americans], I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every American kid, in every school, were galvanized around such a vision. Ah, you say, nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?"

This thought followed on Friedman's assessment that of all the "irresponsible aspects of the [US President's] 2005 budget bill that the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more irresponsible than the fact that funding for the National Science Foundation was cut by nearly 2 percent, or $105 million.

"[B]ecause of the steady erosion of science, math and engineering education in U.S. high schools, our cold war generation of American scientists is not being fully replenished. We traditionally filled the gap with Indian, Chinese and other immigrant brainpower. But post-9/11, many of these foreign engineers are not coming here anymore, and, because the world is now flat and wired, many others can stay home and innovate without having to emigrate."

And Friedman goes on to report that Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) told him that unless something is done and done soon the US' scientific foundation will disintegrate and with it the high US standard of living in fifteen to twenty years.

Now about that matter of US foreign policy and its consequences, the NYT's Op-Ed contributor reckons that if the US were to become energy independent the result will be "sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. ....political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran. Yes, deprive these regimes of the huge oil windfalls on which they depend and you will force them to reform by having to tap their people instead of oil wells. These regimes won't change when we tell them they should. They will change only when they tell themselves they must."

Of course the world know-alls such as John Howard, Tony Blair, Alexander Downer and Jack Straw, not to mention George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice, will say what does Friedman know, but of course they have to say that.