Chris Mooney: Can You Have a Purely Economic Sputnik?

[bdemelle]

Chris Mooney on DeSmogBlog: http://www.desmogblog.com/can-you-have-purely-economic-sputnik

Last night, the president gave a speech that never directly mentioned the most pressing science-based issue of our time—global warming, climate change. I don’t like being so right in my prediction: Even I thought he’d say it once or twice at least.

At the same time, however, he announced a new national love affair with science, innovation, and clean energy, using a playbook that seems right out of the National Academy of Sciences’ now famous 2005 Rising Above the Gathering Storm report. And he capped it all off with a line of almost mythic potential: “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

Could it really be? And can this approach—save the climate, the country, the economy, and pretty much everything through technological innovation—deliver on its own?

First, let’s recap what happened following the Soviet launch of Sputnik. It really did create a boom of investment in the sciences in the U.S., which in turn drove prosperity—but it was an investment centrally impelled by fear of an external enemy. As I wrote with Sheril Kirshenbaum in our book Unscientific America:
The first Earth-orbiting satellite, beeping at us from above, inspired stark fears about our national security and competitiveness: Were we falling behind in technology? Would the Soviets fire on us from the skies, and if they tried, could we stop them? As Senator Lister Hill, an Alabama Democrat, put it, the nation had experienced “a severe blow, some would say a disastrous blow, at America’s self-confidence and at inner prestige in the world.” If the Soviets beat us to the moon, added sci-fi visionary Arthur C. Clarke, “they will have won the solar system, and theirs will be the voice of the future…As it will deserve to be.”

This is the context in which the National Science Foundation's previously paltry research budget achieved liftoff, and in which NASA was created to power us to the moon. This is the context in which graduate students were given generous funding—under the National Defense Education Act—to pursue science and engineering careers. This is the context in which we renewed focus on science education in schools. ...

Read more: http://www.desmogblog.com/can-you-have-purely-economic-sputnik

[Warpy]

1. That statement puzzled me because I know what Sputnik was and represented

When the Russians launched it, it caught this country totally flatfooted and years behind in research and development of a working space program.

If this is another Sputnik moment, it means we've been caught sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on while the rest of the world has moved on with the current lessons.

Either Obama knows what he's talking about and realizes that either the hidebound conservatives in both parties are going to have to start doing their jobs or this country is going to turn into a total third world backwater in record time, or some speechwriter who doesn't know what it means put it in there and he didn't think to take it out.

Still, there are too many people who don't know what it really means to make it a particularly effective statement.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. Wait. That's doesn't say "sputnik" that says "hindenburg". n/t

[CHIMO]

3. No

An economic Sputnik is nonsense. Economies don't care where growth comes from. They just move there.

Back in the 50's, Sputnik meant an investment in education. It was the new world of science over beliefs and the same old, same old.
It has zero relevance in North America now.