The Politics of Hope and the Politics of Fear

America's longstanding ability to inspire world efforts that direct science and technology toward addressing global problems is becoming a casualty of the Bush Administration's assault on internationalism and of soaring federal deficits. Whatever success we may have in addressing public fears through investments in national defense and homeland security, there's little doubt that we're racing headlong toward global disasters in areas ranging from environmental and resource management to demographics to disease control And yet in pragmatic terms, the most dangerous long term threat to US security is likely to be a rapidly growing gap between the billion people benefiting from modern technology and the five billion who largely aren't.

There is real reason for hope that these neglected global threats can clearly be met with creative and continuous investment in new technology. But US leadership is essential, and not just because our economic base makes us the world's largest research enterprise. The US has an astonishing tradition of embracing technology-driven change and finding ways to combine enthusiastic private investment with massive public support. This model has driven progress in modern aviation, atomic energy and space exploration. It's pushed forward everything from automobiles and highways to the Internet. To be certain, the government has supported some really dumb projects, forcing an inappropriate design for nuclear power onto commercial markets and hyping the abortive US Synfuels project. Still, for the most part, public investment in research and infrastructure-combined with a willingness to juggle regulations in ways that encourage invention-has worked remarkably well.

Big ideas, crazy or otherwise, are much more likely to be taken seriously by US investors than by anyone else. Electricity, telephones, movies, automobiles, airplanes, rock videos and countless other American obsessions depended on science and invention from around the world. But Americans were somehow better able to meet the ideas with big money and to tolerate the social disruptions - and occasional chaos - that these products created. What other nation could embrace something like the Internet with enthusiasm so blind that a few years after dot-coms were offered, URL addresses were posted on everything from chewing gum wrappers to instruments for brain-surgery? And American tolerance for risk has been incredible: where else could enough animal spirits be found to create several trillion dollars in new wealth and then see most of it disappear overnight? Few would deny that, despite its pitfalls, this enthusiasm has changed the world-and mostly for the better.

This is no time for the US to be missing in action. Consider the following challenges:

Energy and the Environment

Finding a sustainable way to provide the 9 billion people likely to be alive at the end of this century with a reasonable level of prosperity presents an extraordinary scientific, technical and political challenge.

The average person on the planet today consumes energy at a rate of 2 kilowatts (kW), but about two billion people alive today don't use much more commercial energy each than Homer did. Americans, however, use an average of 11.5 kW, and the average Western European uses roughly 5 kW. If the world's population increases from six billion to nine billion during the coming century, and the typical person enjoys the lifestyle of a typical European today, total energy use will quadruple.

Can we possibly meet the energy requirements of nine billion people while delivering a prosperous lifestyle? There's no question that it's technically possible to solve this problem. Resource constraints need not limit growth if we're willing to keep pushing the frontier, since we're nowhere near theoretical limits in providing modern amenities. For example, we can make enormous gains in transportation by paying attention to simple things like urban design, advanced transit strategies and new technologies for vehicles and fuels. Advanced technology has scarcely touched traditional industries like housing. And biological systems - which manage to operate human brains on much less power than a Pentium III and run nanodevices that assemble systems like ears out of simple raw materials - provide clues to possible gains in manufacturing and energy efficiency.

Yet while much is possible, action has been anemic. Private investment in research has declined because incentives for invention are weak. Simply increasing the price of fuels to reflect the environmental and security costs associated with each would appear an easy solution. But US politics demands that energy prices kept low. A confusing mixture of incentives and regulations has been created in the past few decades. While automobile and appliance efficiency standards and other regulations may have helped, they are often offset by production subsidies that keep prices artificially low. Since the full cost of energy consumption is not reflected in market prices, private incentives for innovation in energy efficiency and energy supplies are well below optimum.

The political process is stalled, with environmentalists and the Bush Administration engaged in a paralyzing ritual dance. The administration emphasizes technology as a long term fix; environmentalists argue that this is an excuse for doing nothing, and want immediate regulatory requirements forcing change. Both are only partially right. The Bush Administration is right to argue that over the long term, radical technical change is essential to any solution -after all, we're looking for 300% improvement, and the kinds of regulatory changes the environmentalists want are likely to be overwhelmed quickly by the sheer pressure of growth. Suppose, for example, automobile fuel economy standards were increased 30% over ten years: growth in energy consumption would be slowed, but thirteen years after the program started, consumption would be back to where it originally was.

At the same time, environmentalists are right to argue some changes must be forced now, as their effects will linger for decades. It can take a generation for a new automotive technology to become dominant on the road. For example, a new auto design available today would take a decade to become the dominant new vehicle sold and another decade to become the bulk of the fleet on the road. Houses built today will be around for a century. With nearly two billion people likely to move into large urban areas during the next five decades, decisions made about these communities' layouts will potentially haunt us for generations.

To maintain the flow of innovation, a large and sustained investment in research will be essential, as will programs to test concepts at a significant scale as they become practical. For example, while there's good reason to believe that US energy consumption can be cut by at least 30% with cost-effective technologies, some of these needed innovations are unlikely to be able to compete with cheap Middle Eastern petroleum and natural gas.

The Administration's plan to spend $1.2 billion on hydrogen research over 5 years is clearly a worthwhile effort. But it will scarcely let the US catch up to the level of spending in Europe and Japan in similar areas and it's hard to take seriously, since its proposed budget for renewable energy and energy efficiency (which includes most of the hydrogen research) is lower than the 2002 budget for the same field. Moreover, the budget cuts funding for energy efficiency research by nearly 15%. Not only will much critical work go unfunded, but broad cuts will block development and testing needed now on technologies like super-clean diesels for hybrids and alternative liquid fuels that may be easier to introduce than hydrogen.

Infectious Diseases

We've focused great attention on heart disease and cancer but our confidence in the miracle of 20th-century antibiotics has tempted us to underinvest in research on infectious diseases. And yet infectious diseases are not likely to remain the "orphan diseases" of the third world for the rest of the century. We've been fortunate that influenza of the kind that killed millions in 1918 hasn't reemerged - we'd be only slightly better prepared. Diseases like AIDS can move around the world with breathtaking speed, and it's only dumb luck that AIDS is not easily spread. The chances are very good that the world will face a dangerous infection from a natural mutation or from an intentionally manipulated pathogen before the century is out.

It's essential to increase resources focused on infectious diseases both to protect ourselves against naturally occurring infections that can spread rapidly through world transportation systems, and to defend ourselves against diseases intentionally created for malicious purposes. The work must be able to unravel the extraordinary methods that infections like malaria use to resist conventional therapies, and develop strategies for addressing infections able to mutate rapidly. Tools are needed for rapidly detecting and identifying new infectious agents. And it may soon be essential to be able to design vaccines and targeted therapies only hours or days after a new infection is identified.

Education

Access to information and education are essential to a world in which each person can enjoy the benefits of prosperity and free society. Education is also particularly important for empowering women in developing societies. But finding a way to provide education at an affordable price presents a heroic challenge.

Skillful use of modern information technology can help. We are so obsessed by the latest developments in computing that we easily forget that the chips that drove state of the art computers five years ago are available for pennies today. With the right kind of investment, it should be possible to develop a simple wireless device capable of supporting access to the world economy and intellectual resources for less than ten dollars per unit. Equally important, it should be possible to build the technological infrastructure needed to deliver high quality education to anyone with access to these devices. Well designed tools will make it much easier to build and use instructional systems tailored to the specific needs of each individual and culture. Moreover, this learning can be highly motivating, timely and provide skill assessments that make sense for both the instructors and learners.

Water

Agricultural and other human uses of water consume between a third and half of all global water runoff, and are growing rapidly. Moreover, an increasing fraction of available water is highly contaminated by human or industrial waste. And compounding this problem, the runoff is unevenly distributed. Even in the US, more than ten million acres are irrigated in areas which mine ancient water supplies from shrinking aquifers, and aquifers in Northern China and the Middle East are declining precipitously.

Unfortunately, the changes needed to make water use more efficient often face huge political hurdles. Entrenched agricultural interests have produced a gridlock in the US and in much of the world which is unlikely to be broken absent a catastrophe. The only practical paths for avoiding crisis may be in developing technologies that take advantage of improved plant genetics and irrigation methods to increase agricultural-water efficiency, and in promoting strategies for improving water-use productivity in residential, commercial and industrial applications. A low cost technique for desalinizing ocean or brackish water and for purifying contaminated water could also break through the political morass, and would surely rank as one of the century's key inventions.

Food

A related challenge involves finding ways of feeding 9-10 billion people. Again, the problem is not simply one of increased numbers, but the implication which accompanies a shift to the consumption styles of the affluent. In poor nations, per capita consumption is about 2100 Calories of which about 80% come from grain. US per capita consumption averages about 3700 Calories of which only about 20% is from grain; more than a third comes from animal products. Typically a Calorie of animal products requires an order of magnitude more land than grains. Attempting to reproduce western eating habits worldwide while supporting population growth could drive dramatic growth in food demand, and if American experience is any example, in waistlines.

While demand will surely grow, arable land per person has been declining in recent years-particularly in the most heavily populated parts of the world. Water-logging and salinity, urban sprawl and other factors are the culprits. Only modest amounts of new land may be found in sub-Saharan Africa and in South America by clearing forests and other natural regions but such a strategy introduces other problems.

It's obvious that the growth in demand can only be sustained by maintaining growth in output per acre. Low input, low-till production and other sustainable agriculture techniques are essential for reducing soil loss and use of agricultural chemicals, but it's unlikely that they can, by themselves, achieve needed increases in output per acre. Long term solutions require genetic improvements that can cut inputs and increase land productivity - the research challenge is doing this in a way that is demonstrably safe for the environment and for consumers. It's essential to develop tools for restoring degraded lands and cleaning contaminated aquifers. We might even consider looking for ingenious ways to go beyond consuming primarily the fruits of plants (e.g. grains), that have been the center of productivity research since the beginnings of agriculture, and look for chemistry that can use the glucose in cellulose and other plant constituents that are the bulk of plant biomass to synthesize attractive food products.

Reopening the Frontier

For several generations the world has been able to rely on America for the vision, passion, money and inspired recklessness needed both to imagine and to act. It's not hubris to suggest that it will be difficult for the world to fill the void left if America abandons this historic role, and instead ignores the challenges this century presents. Solutions won't be found with wishful thinking or by relying entirely on private investors-many demand thoughtful public action.

If the US envisions its role as a superpower only in military terms, the world will have lost an essential resource for maintaining hope and for creating a constructive, pragmatic vision for the future. It is plain foolishness to believe that goodwill alone can substitute for a good defense. But defense built entirely on intimidating our adversaries is surely not sufficient for building a secure long-term future. For this, the US must again be viewed as a nation willing to work closely with an international community and lead with its relentless hope in endless frontiers.

Henry Kelly is the President of the Federation of American Scientists.