The world needs the appliance of science
DONALD TRUMP’S science adviser has resigned for the simplest of reasons: the President has decided to do without science. Charlottesville provided the occasion, but the punchline was clear. The distinguished professor Daniel Kammen could no longer accept ‘your decision to abandon the leadership opportunities and the job creation benefits of the Paris Climate Accord and to undermine energy and environmental research’.
Mr Trump’s failure to understand is becoming a threat to world order. No doubt the rest of us will continue to work together to fight climate change, but, without the important scientific contribution that the USA provides, the task will be significantly harder. However, Mr Trump has decided that his opinions should override scientific truth and that spending money to establish that truth is an inconvenience his regime can do without.
Prof Kammen unerringly points the finger at two inevitable consequences: America abandons its leadership role (increasingly to China) and it loses the job opportunities that come from building a cleaner economy. Stuck with the old dirty energy base, the USA will fail to develop, use and export technologies that will transform the rest of the developed and developing world.
The issue is no longer a matter of opinion. Paris meant that nearly 200 nations charted the direction in which the world would move. No doubt progress will not be even—there will be setbacks and successes—but the journey has begun and the destination agreed. However, Mr Trump and Kim Jong-un have decided to march off in a contrary direction, to the detriment of their very different nations.
Both have put their opinions above the facts —not only scientific facts, but political and economic as well. That was what drove Prof Kammen to resign. He could not be party to the damage done to his nation or betray the oath of fealty he had sworn to its constitution. All this may be being played out in the USA, but it’s of real importance to the UK and particularly to country people.
Our ability to feed ourselves depends on environmental science. Recovering soil fertility, adapting to the changing climate, altering land-use patterns to counter the increase in flooding: all these depend on the very science that’s under attack in the USA. Of course, none of the work is exclusively done there, but it will be hugely damaging to lose the funding and intellectual resource that contribute so much to the international effort.
The damage goes far beyond even this. Just as Mr Trump’s refusal properly to condemn racism gave permission to supremacists to say and do things that had long been impossible, so the attack on science gives strength to voices around the world that also wish to promote personal opinions over proven facts. The climate deniers and dismissers are reinforced by his example and the irrational and illogical given greater credence by the stance of the world’s most powerful leader.
Britain now has a great opportunity as well as a huge burden. We already have the most effective institutions for combatting climate change, we play a leadership role in much of energy and environmental research and our universities and agricultural colleges are among the strongest in the world. We must reinforce their position, protect them from a damaging Brexit and provide the resources and encouragement for scientists and researchers to come here to continue what they can no longer do in the USA.
Britain already has the most effective institutions for combatting climate change