By way of contrast, George W. Bush appointed two men to serve as Energy Secretary – the first, Spencer Abraham, is a conservative activist lawyer with no scientific education worth mentioning.  The second, Samuel Bodman, held a degree in chemical engineering but spent the majority of his professional life working in venture capital, and for several years was the COO of Fidelity Venture Associates.  With all due respect to these two men, neither was fit to serve as the head of the Department of Energy.

Steven Chu lives for energy as a physicist.  His life’s work is the study of matter and its motion through spacetime – energy - through a general analysis of nature.  He spends his days pondering the simplest of things in order to arrive at the most profound conclusions.

Like Newton’s legendary eureka-moment with the falling apple, for some odd reason it often takes a learned genius to realize the most basic truths, that after the fact seem so obvious it’s amazing no one realized it sooner – what goes up must come down, every action has an equal and opposite reaction… or, white paint can save our climate.

Last week at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, Dr. Chu presented a solution so simple and so elegant, it’s nearly impossible to find it credible; paint the world white to stop global warming.  According to Chu, lightening the color of all the world’s roads, paved surfaces and roofs would be the equivalent of taking every single car off the road for 11 years.

(The Times of London has more here, but note the author incorrectly states this would “cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off” – this is a matter of reflection, not emission – shame on you, Mark Henderson, ‘Science Editor’)

Obviously this is not a panacea for climate change, as there are household heating and cooling issues that come into play, and our environmental concerns go far beyond absorption and retention of solar heat – but it should serve to illustrate a few key points:

• Leave science to the scientists – educated, intelligent, non-dogmatic, curious explorers, and not to businessmen, ideologues and politicians.
• The simplest solution is often the best – elaborate government regulations have often caused more problems, pollution and wasted energy than they have alleviated, particularly because they didn’t leave science to the scientists.
  
• Government regulations should be as non-intrusive and low-impact as possible – global efforts to ban the use of CFCs in order to preserve the ozone layer had an unintended side-effect of increasing deaths from starvation in the developing world, where it was used a cheap refrigerant.  We have to keep the big picture in mind.
  
• Humanity is unendingly resourceful – which is terribly convenient, because we are also unendingly greedy and expedient.  But if we simply make a concerted effort to find simple, painless, effective methods of improving our environmental situation (something everyone wants), there is no need to result to either the zealous religiosity of the cult of Global Warming, or the arrogant denials of the “everything is just fine” know-nothings.
  

Kudos to Dr. Steven Chu for another in a string of world-changing ideas, and kudos to Mr. Obama for the wise appointment.

It’s worth nothing that the strain making all the headlines isn’t properly called swine flu, but is in fact a “reassortment” of human and swine flu strains designated H1N1.  These types of reassortant and recombinant strains of flu virus are an increased risk with “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, which most people know as “factory farms.”

Last year, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production published a report on CAFOs which contains this little gem:

The continual cycling of swine influenza viruses and other animal pathogens in large herds or flocks provides increased opportunity for the generation of novel viruses through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human-to-human transmission of these viruses. In addition, agricultural workers serve as a bridging population between their communities and the animals in large confinement facilities. This bridging increases the risk of novel virus generation in that human viruses may enter the herds or flocks and adapt to the animals.

Reassortant influenza viruses with human components have ravaged the modern swine industry. Such novel viruses not only put the workers and animals at risk of infections, but also potentially increase zoonotic disease transmission risk to the communities where the workers live. For instance, 64% of 63 persons exposed to humans infected with H7N7 avian influenza virus had serological evidence of H7N7 infection following the 2003 Netherlands avian influenza outbreak in poultry. Similarly, the spouses of swine workers who had no direct contact with pigs had increased odds of antibodies against swine influenza virus. Recent modeling work has shown that among communities where a large number of CAFO workers live, there is great potential for these workers to accelerate pandemic influenza virus transmission.

Pew Commission researchers met with counterparts from the University of Iowa where were studying avian flu, and their discussions created a concern about a nightmare scenario of an avian-swine-human superflu that could be a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic, believed by some to be an avian-swine flu spread worldwide by farm workers traveling to WWI training camps.

Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said on Monday that they have identified what they believe was the earliest known case of this current outbreak.  The 4-year-old boy was from the village of La Gloria, Veracruz – not far from the Granjas Carroll de Mexico plant, co-owned by Smithfield Foods.  The local community had been protesting pollution at the plant when the child contracted the virus.  Local citizens believe they were being made sick by air and water contamination from pig waste, following widespread outbreak of a “particularly powerful respiratory disease” in early April, according to the Associated Press.

The Mexican government is currently testing hogs from Smithfield’s farms throughout Mexico, and Smithfield and Granjas Carroll have agreed to adopt government recommendations to “begin reinforcing its biosecurity measures to prevent workers and animals from being infected,” according to Mexican newspaper Reforma - which is also reporting that people in La Gloria have been threatened, harassed and even arrested for demonstrating against the huge company.

David Kirby at Huffington Post has more, here and here.

This can’t really be called a “new baby boom” by anyone besides hyperbolic headline writers seeking your attention.  While it’s a new high, numbers have been slowly rising for decades, nothing like the massive spike of the post-WWII era, and we’ve been barely hanging on to a roughly 1% per year rate of population increase.

This tiny margin of growth makes the U.S. the world’s fastest growing industrialized country, but the upward trend is not expected to last.  Birth rates crashed during the Great Depression, and many believe the recent economic downturn will negatively impact American birth rates in the years to come.

We’re a long way from needing to worry about the kind of catastrophic population decrease that Russia is currently experiencing, with an expected 22% drop in population over the next 45 years, and the idea that we need to dramatically increase our birth rate is really only espoused by religious zealots and people with thinly-veiled xenophobia.

While developed nations fret over the possibility of more and more retirees demanding benefits and over-taxing a shrinking workforce, the developing world faces a population explosion. Unfortunately those who might have the most ability to reverse this trend choose to ignore the problem.  This week the Pope visited Africa, and regardless of some of the world’s highest birth rates (not to mention HIV infection rates), the Vatican still condemns the use of condoms and insists Catholics should go forth and multiply.  The African continent’s population is expected to double to nearly 2 billion by the year 2050.

China has the world’s largest population at 1.3 billion, and the government has established a strict 1 child per couple policy in order to fight overpopulation.  Even with one of the lowest population growth rates in the developing world (.006% per year) as a result of these harsh measures, the population is expected to continue growing for another 25 years before peaking at 1.5 billion.

200 years ago, there were 1 billion people alive on the surface of the planet, today there are over 6.75 billion, and by 2050 the global population will be around 9 billion according to most estimates.

I’d hate to be perceived as a doomsayer, but inevitably at this rate we will eventually reach the carrying capacity of the Earth.  With growing concerns of climate change as a result of human activity and scarcity of resources, it’s hard to believe we aren’t getting very close to that limit.  The present system simply cannot handle a substantial portion of the developing world demanding the consumption rate or quality of life that Americans currently enjoy.

What are we to do?  Americans refuse to apologize for our quality of life, and we’re generally loathe to reduce our consumption or change our habits.  Lowering birthrates admittedly creates economic concerns, and obviously draconian and inhumane methods of population control/reduction are strictly off the table.

Certainly, investing in family planning education and distribution of birth control in the 3rd world will do wonders, but it’s still only a band-aid.  Perhaps, barring the invention of free or nearly-free energy, the only option available to us now is to finally get serious about space exploration and colonization.

The one thing we undoubtedly cannot afford is to continue business as usual.

“By doing this, we will ensure America’s continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.  And that is essential, not only for our economic prosperity, but for the progress of all humanity.” – President Barack Obama

The new administration has moved on several fronts to restore the importance and influence of hard science in public policy since President Obama took office less than 50 days ago.

Having signed a memorandum to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making,” and declared that scientific policy decisions must be “based on facts, not ideology,” Obama has set the tone for his adminisitration’s approach.

Backing words with action, his first week in office saw an order to the EPA to review California’s application to regulate greenhouse gases, which had been rejected by Bush, and an order to the DOT to implement the fuel efficiency standards passed last year, which were never put into place by Bush’s transportation department.

Obama has overturned Bush’s 2001 order banning new stem cell lines, and $500 million will go towards green job training from the stimulus as part of a plan to get 25% of our energy from renewable resources by 2025.

While some are questioning the president’s ability to fix the economy and make a commitment to increasing funding for scientific research, I’m optimistic this kind of investment will pay off many times over.  I’m still holding out hope for a “Manhattan Project” for solar energy.