Science Publishes Special Issue on "Sustainability and Energy". (February 9, 2007)

AAAS President John Holdren

    While Australia's newly anointed Minister for The Environment and Water Resources, the Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, excels himself in hyperbolic comedy at the dispatch box, the journal Science has devoted much of its February 9^th issue to the matter of "Sustainability and Energy".

And that includes a 33 minute Podcast (also available from TFW's home page until Feb.22) for those who don't have access to the journal's articles.

In his editorial, AAAS President John Holdren, who wears the hats of director of the Woods Hole Research Center, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, and the director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, points out that the "theme for the 2007 annual meeting of the AAAS, to be held in San Francisco on 15 to 19 February, is "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being," and goes on to explain, "Well-being has environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural dimensions as well as economic ones, and the goal of sustainable well-being entails improving all of these dimensions in ways and to end points that are consistent with maintaining the improvements indefinitely."

He lays heavy emphasis on the need for science to provide the means to attain "sustainable well-being" and that, "No part of this challenge is more complex or more demanding than its energy dimension... In a world where today one-third of primary energy comes from oil... and 80% comes from oil, coal, and natural gas combined... simply by expanding what we are already doing... is a prescription for disaster."

Professor Holdren then says simply, "[What is] required is a several fold increase in public and private investments to improve the technologies of energy supply. We need to know whether and how the carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel use can be affordably and reliably sequestered away from the atmosphere; whether and how nuclear energy can be made safe enough and proliferation-resistant enough to be substantially expanded worldwide; and to what extent biofuel production can be increased without intolerable impacts on food supply or ecosystem services. And we need to improve the affordability of the direct harnessing of sunlight for society's energy needs."

There is no question that with the economic resources at Australia's call both in the private and public sectors that the nation could be a significant contributor not only in reducing it's current contribution to global warming but also to contribute to the mechanisms for doing so world-wide.

For the past decade the Federal Coalition has ignored the call and in effect claimed special dispensation from doing so. Let other first world nations make the running, if they are fool enough to do so, but not us, has been Prime Minister John Howard's mantra until now when he as begun to pay lip service to the fact of anthropogenic global warming.

Where Mr Howard and his cabinet colleagues have been remarkably crafty and efficient is in the straight-jacketing of the development of the sustainable energy sector and in its attack on the nation's universities.

It's past time that a stop be put to that.

Science' Special Online Collection: Sustainability and Energy

can be found at

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/sustainability/

The Editorial and Energy for the Long Haul are open to all, others require a subscription.