The Democratic Party's Science and Technology Policy Platform
What the Dems think about sex education, fracking, climate change, drilling, renewables, R&D 'investments,' and much more.
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So the 2008 Platform was apparently wrong: we can “drill our way” at least part of the way to energy independence. The president also promised a future in which the country develops “a hundred-year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet” which will “support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.” He promised that if his policies are followed, the U.S. “can cut our oil imports in half by 2020.”
Did we double our use of renewable energy? Indeed the amount of power produced by wind turbines has increased from 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2009 to 139,000 gigawatt-hours in the past year. Solar power net generation rose to 2,400 gigawatt-hours in the past year from 900 gigawatt-hours in 2009. To provide some perspective, Americans consumed 4,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2010, which means that wind power contributed 3.5 percent and solar power less than one-thousandth of the electricity consumed by Americans.
What about drilling? President Obama correctly claims to have opened millions of acres to drilling for hydrocarbons. But how does that compare with previous administrations? In its first three years, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the Bush administration leased 8.8 million acres for oil exploration and production, compared to 5.3 million for the Obama administration. The Clinton administration leased 11.4 million acres in its first three years.
What about the total number of new wells drilled on federal lands? The first three years of the Bush administration saw 9,276 new wells drilled, whereas under the Obama administration 9,693 wells were. Just as a comparison, during the global oil price run-up during the last three years of the Bush administration 15,095 new wells started producing. After the BP oil rig blowout, President Obama closed drilling on most of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts.
The 2008 goal of generating 25 percent of America’s electricity using renewable sources by 2025 was not mentioned, but the 2012 Platform did note, “President Obama has encouraged innovation to reach his goal of generating 80 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources by 2035.” How much progress has been made toward creating the 5 million green jobs promised in 2008? In this regard, the 2012 Platform offers the following odd locution: “We’ve supported nearly 225,000 clean energy jobs.” Supported? A green job creation rate of 225,000 every four years suggests that only about 560,000 such jobs will be created by 2018, a shortfall of nearly 90 percent from the 2008 goal.
Still, it is heartening that the President recognizes the importance of natural gas production to the future of U.S. economy and job creation. This suggests that his administration will not endorse ideological environmentalists calls for a moratorium on fracking shale gas. The 2012 Democratic Platform declares, “We are expediting the approval process to build out critical oil and gas lines essential to transporting our energy for consumers.” Really? It is true that the Obama Administration has approved the southern leg of the Keystone pipeline? Despite several analyses that concluded that it was safe enough to build, the administration has, however, delayed until after the November elections its decision about the northern leg which would transport oil sands crude from Canada to U.S. Gulf coast refineries.
With regard to nuclear power, the Obama administration in 2010 proposed tripling federal loan guarantees for building new nuclear power plants from the Bush administration’s $18 billion to $54 billion. In the 2012 Platform nuclear power is mentioned in passing just once and there is an oblique reference to “reducing energy waste.” The Obama administration did keep its promise to “protect” Nevada from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility by basically shutting it down. However, the closing of that facility was not based on “sound science” as stated in the 2008 platform. An April 2011 report [PDF] by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) flatly concluded that the Department of Energy’s “decision to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program was made for policy reasons, not technical or safety reasons.”
Innovation/Immigration
The Democratic Platform is much more welcoming of immigrants than is the Republican, but they both share the view that foreign-born students with advanced degrees should be encouraged to stay here to build innovative businesses and create jobs.
Space Exploration
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have much love government space exploration anymore. The 2008 Democratic Platform promised to “invest in a strong and inspirational vision for space exploration.” The 2012 Platform declared, “President Obama has charted a new mission for NASA to lead us to a future that builds on America’s legacy of innovation and exploration.” Since 2009, the NASA budget has been essentially flat while falling in constant dollar terms by about 7 percent by 2012. To its credit, the Obama administration scrapped NASA’s moon shot program and has focused more on privatizing and commercializing manned space travel.
Climate Change
The 2008 Democratic Platform announced, “We will lead to defeat the epochal, man-made threat to the planet: climate change.” The platform denounced the Bush administration’s efforts “to deny the science of climate change and the need to act.” The Democrats promised, “We will implement a market-based cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic change and we will set interim targets along the way to ensure that we meet our goal.” Not only would cap-and-trade scheme stop man-made global warming, but “dedicating a portion of the revenues generated by an economy-wide cap and trade program” would pay for all those exciting new “investments” in clean energy they planned to make. Alas, this did not happen, since the 2008 promise to impose a cap-and-trade carbon rationing scheme died in the U.S. Senate in 2010.
Back in 2008, it was fashionable to believe that the chief obstacle to a global response to climate change was the obdurate Bush administration. “Never again will we sit on the sidelines, or stand in the way of collective action to tackle this global challenge,” vowed the 2008 Democrats. The 2008 Platform acknowledged that addressing climate change must include “binding and enforceable commitments to reducing emissions, especially for those that pollute the most: the United States, China, India, the European Union, and Russia."
At the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, in 2009, President Obama found that getting those binding agreements was far easier said than done. That conference collapsed when China publicly embarrassed Obama by refusing to give in to his demands that it commit to binding carbon emissions reduction targets. At subsequent U.N. climate conferences, even with Obama administration “leadership,” all that was agreed upon is to have future meetings that might result in a new global climate compact to go into force by 2020.
In the 2012 Platform, the Democrats “pledge to continue showing international leadership on climate change, working toward an agreement to set emission limits in unison with other emerging powers.” In addition, they intend to pursue cuts in domestic greenhouse gas emissions “though regulation and market solutions.” As it happens, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are back down to their level in 1992. This is largely not due to Obama administration green energy policies, but because fracking has produced an abundant supply of cheap natural gas.
After analyzing both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms, it’s evident (and depressing) that politicians always believe that science is on the side of any policy they favor.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
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The phrase "regardless of ability to pay" suggests that [a woman's] right to choose includes the right to make taxpayers pay for abortions.
And that would be regardless of the taxpayers' ability to pay. Hnce the increase in the national debt, am I right? -
The 2012 Democratic Party Platform lays out progressive views
You shouldn't use "progressive" in this context, Ron. There is nothing that favors progress in the Dem platform, the term is as much a misnomer as "liberal" has become. Leftist is the proper term for that type of statist.
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No, everything in their platform favors progress toward technocratic totalitarianism. It's perfectly accurate.
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"As he made clear in his remarks when signed the stem cell executive order"
I think you are missing a "he". -
pm: Thanks. Fixed.
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Is there a particular reason why you've left out other scientific issues such as GMO crops or vaccines which the left is HORRIBLE on?
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He's talking about the Democratic platform, not the left in general. I did a really quick search of it (as in "load it, do a 'find on page' for things like GMO, genetic, modified, crops...") and didn't see those issues mentioned.
I don't doubt that a lot of Democrat politicians are on the anti-science side of those issues, but they don't expect talking about them to gain any votes.
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I don't abide the "all vaccines are evil" types, but the people saying that children are being given too many vaccines in too short a time at too young an age have a strong case, IMO.
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That opinion appears pretty humble from here. Care to share some of those well-designed, reproducible studies that demonstrate the harm you are imagining?
B cells exist to recognize and attack foreign antigens. Memory cells exist to prime the immune system in future encounters with foreign invaders. Vaccines present the immune system with antigens. If your body is circulating antibodies against the immunized agent post-vaccine, you didn't get too many vaccines in too short a time - it did its job! It is actually fairly easy to measure something like that.
How many antigens do you think your body encounters in a normal day - sans vaccines? Rhino-viruses, influenza, staph, strep, salmonella, hanta-virus, pollen, mold, yeast, protists, not to mention thousands of different types of phage and plant viruses. You probably get a billion times the exposure to antigen in any given vaccine every single day. Your body is built to live in a sea of hostile molecules.
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Health officials consider a vaccine to be safe if no bad reactions — like seizures, intestinal obstruction, or anaphylaxis — occur acutely. The CDC has not done any studies to assess the long-term effects of its immunization schedule. To do that one must conduct a randomized controlled trial, the lynchpin of evidence-based medicine, where one group of children is vaccinated on the CDC's schedule and a control group is not vaccinated. Investigators then follow the two groups for a number of years (not just three to four weeks, as has been done in vaccine safety studies). Concerns that vaccinations in infants cause chronic neurologic and immune system disorders would be put to rest, and their safety certified, if the number of children who develop these diseases is the same in both groups. No such studies have been done, so vaccine proponents cannot say that vaccines are indeed as safe as they think they are.
(Emphasis mine)
- Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD -
Some more interesting facts from the above referenced article:
Fifty years ago, when the immunization schedule contained only four vaccines (for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox), autism was virtually unknown. First discovered in 1943, this most devastating malady in what is now a spectrum of pervasive developmental disorders afflicted less than 1 in 10,000 children. Today, one in every 68 American families has an autistic child. Other, less severe developmental disorders, rarely seen before the vaccine era, have also reached epidemic proportions. Four million American children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. One in six American children are now classified as "Learning Disabled."
Our children are also experiencing an epidemic of autoimmune disorders — Type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and bowel disorders. There has been a 17-fold increase in Type I diabetes, from 1 in 7,100 children in the 1950s to 1 in 400 now. Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis afflicts 300,000 American children. Twenty-five years ago this disease was so rare that public health officials did not keep any statistics on it. There has been a 4-fold increase in asthma, and bowel disorders in children are much more common now than they were 50 years ago. -
First discovered in 1943, this most devastating malady [autism] in what is now a spectrum of pervasive developmental disorders afflicted less than 1 in 10,000 children.
I'll call a bullshit there.
I'm pretty sure autism existed before 1943, and in probably similar numbers.
Only it was called mental redardation, imbecilism or just plain contrariness. The worst cases were institutionalized as incurables the others were tolerated or had the shit beaten out of them until they learned to conform.
A slow progress in more humane treatment occured through til the 70s.
Tody, even advocates for children with autism spectrum disorders admit that the disease is grossly overdiagnosed and mostly for the purposes of allowing parents to collect government benefits.
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Part of my point there was to point out that people seem to often claim that an increase in something has occured, when in fact all that has happened is that it has become possible to measure the phenomenon in question with greater precision or that the the standards used to define the phenomenon have changed.
Or, in the case of autism - and plenty of other disorders - whole new classifications have been made in the light of investigation of the information available.
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Of course autism existed before 1943, but "probably" not in anything like the present numbers, even accounting for overdiagnosis (for whatever reason) and certainly not the kind which develops suddenly in a born-normal child. And if you are suggesting that the massive increase in autoimmune disorders is merely an artifact of better diagnosis, you are as irrational as the worst of the anti-vaccine advocates.
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There is no science but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger and Jesus as second messenger and, perhaps, some buddha bologna thrown on that sammich. You think I jest? Well, I do, but in all sincerity science hasn't a nickles chance in hell with the juggernaut of insanity called religion skittering about the place.
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science hasn't a nickles chance in hell with the juggernaut of insanity called religion skittering about the place.
I know. Can you believe they still have Galileo locked up? Wait a second, what century is this?
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The age of the technocrat, and all the religious zeal and worship that comes with it.
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You read like an evangelical or a charismatic Catholic, friend. This must be worn like a badge of spiritual fervor.
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"There is no science but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger "
Filed and saved for later.
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"“We know we can't drill our way to energy independence.” Instead the Platform declared, “We must invest in research and development, and deployment of renewable energy technologies—such as solar, wind, geothermal,"
Just how do they propose to obtain geothermal energy without drilling? Strip-mining? Did anybody literate check this statement before they issued it?
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Thanks for pointing that out, C.S.P. Not that I expect scientific literacy from a political platform, but that is a particularly galling example.
But they're the "reality-based community."
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We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time
How about exercising it on all those spam posts from 'TengVoo'?
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Yeah, we can't use ampersands, but the same spam URLs keep showing up....
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"And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of
cloningsex for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society."Also, everyone belongs to everyone else.
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The idea that either party is good on science and technology is a fucking joke.
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The idea that you want government intervention in science and technology is fucking jokier.
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As to climate change I think my party should embrace its wildly successful 1924 campign slogan.
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I love how these articles always bring out the "blame religion!" types, as if everyone who isn't religious is a brilliant scientific scholar.
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First, I know that science does not advance by consensus, but by testing models against experiment, but if consensus is enough to provoke political action, I suggest a compromise.
There is another science like climate science. It also is working in an area that is very difficult to model. OTOH, It is a much more mature discipline.
There is a lot of consensus in that science, also.
How about we implement policy based on the consensus in economics, first?
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Look at every political statement made by Obummer about the stimulus, and you'll see that he talks about the "consensus" that we needed to do it in order to save the world. There is plenty consensus claims in economic decisions. Whether they are credible or not is another story.
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Good article, Ronald. Like Jack Webb once said, "Just the facts," and that is what you provided.
No complaints from me....this time. -
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