On Earth Day, promote greater scientific literacy.
President Joe Biden is hosting world leaders this week for a climate summit in which he is expected to announce a new goal for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 50% by 2030.
It’s a worthy goal for Earth Day 2021. But it also comes with a pressing need for Bay Area scientists to help Biden make the case for the aggressive approach, and for Bay Area residents to embrace the push for greater scientific literacy.
Communities benefit from scientific advancements and knowledge. This we know.
People who keep abreast of the latest scientific developments make better health care decisions. They support efforts to maintain healthy neighborhoods and fight climate change. But scientific literacy continues to lag scientific progress, despite the increasing availability of scientific information.
It’s distressing that a Pew Research Center poll in 2020 found that 35% of people think scientific research can be used to produce “any result a researcher wants.” The same poll reported that 39% of people say that scientists should stay out of policy debates about scientific issues. And 27% said they did not believe that science, on balance, has a mostly positive effect on society.
Public support will play a part in whether the president is able to succeed in winning a major boost in science spending that’s in his first budget proposal.
Biden is seeking a minimum of 20% increases for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Altogether, the budget calls for an $88 billion increase in science spending.
It’s a welcome reversal of President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget proposal, which called for a 26% funding cut for the EPA, a 7% cut for the NIH and a 14% decrease for the NOAA. Congress resisted and restored the majority of Trump’s cuts, but Democrats’ narrow vote margin in the Senate will make for a bruising budget battle.
The potential benefits of the investments are significant.
The NOAA increase, for example, would provide $800 million for climate research and $500 million for weather and climate satellites.
In terms of health care, NIH government spending helped cut the cancer rate in the United States by 1.5% every year for 15 years between 2000 and 2015. Biden’s proposal would spend $6.5 billion on a new agency — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health that would speed treatments for cancer and other diseases. NIH research is responsible for a 43% positive return of public investment on drugs approved by the FDA in recent years.
Scientists often prefer to stay apolitical. That’s understandable. But the future of publicly funded scientific research is on the line. The only way to address long-standing concerns about how much the public knows and understands about science is to fully engage in the effort for greater scientific literacy and investment.