AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN H. GIBBONS

LUTHER J. CARTER AND THE EDITOR

In an interview on May 4, 1998, the views of Dr. John H. Gibbons, recently retired as Science Advisor to President Clinton, are presented.

I’m having a problem with the last two lines. What did Ms. Millay mean?

I stop with the words “to weave it into fabric.” The rest of it is obscure to me, too. The thought was complete when she described the need for a loom, and the loom was the work I was trying to do at the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and at the White House—namely to pull together, synthesize, and integrate information, and then translate it through the looming process into a fabric our citizen governors could use. When I was sworn in as chairman of OTA its board consisted of a mix of very liberal and very conservative members. In my first board meeting I recited that poem. I think this was a first for them. Here was this physicist trying to recite poetry!

GAINS

What do you see as the highlights of your five years as Science Advisor? What were the greatest achievements and disappointments of your office during this period?

I haven’t been away long enough to reflect properly on that but I feel that during the time I worked with the President and Vice President, we strongly concurred on a paradigm shift about science, technology and its intersection with government. First, we rejected the old notion that if you want to make progress, you’ve got to make smoke, as it were. You remember the old stationery letterhead that industry had that would have a belching smoke stack as a sign of progress. The paradigm we came in with was that you don’t need that. If you are smart enough you can provide for goods and services in ways that have vastly fewer externalities in the marketplace.

The second paradigm shift was that you don’t have to go to court to get problems solved. If you work together on things you can find mutual self–interests and build partnerships between parties that in the past have been adversarial relationships. You can move ahead much more smoothly in trying to meet the needs and opportunities for the American people. And we’ve done that.

I told the President about my town in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley where people knew all about barn raisings and other cooperative ventures. It really works. I saw no reason why we shouldn’t be doing modern–day barn raisings with the public and private sector.

We began within the Executive Branch creating the National Science and Technology Council, which cuts across the agencies. It builds a virtual science and technology department, but one in which you don’t have to go running around reorganizing agencies. Then we built virtual agencies between the Executive Branch and the private sector to do things like the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, and other activities that reached across from the public to the private sectors. On the international scene we established bilateral and multilateral science and technology cooperation agreements with a variety of different countries on different projects. That’s been working very well too.

There are other things that I am very pleased about. Among them are the cessation of nuclear testing, the Chemical Weapons Treaty, progress toward the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the work we are doing now in the whole area of weapons of mass destruction. If these weapons are not properly handled, they are the worst environmental problems of all. I’m pleased at the progress we’ve been able to make in spite of opposition in the Congress—there are some in Congress who want nuclear testing resumed for reasons that are obscure to me.

Also, getting Russia and others working with us on the space station, instead of making weapons to shoot at each other, was an important step, especially in helping Russia move from where it was to where it has needed to go.

Can the Russians afford this project?

I think they can’t afford not to do it. Their space program accounts for an important part of their residual sense of worth in the world community. That is why they wanted not only contracts with the U.S. to build components for the space station, but also a chance to contribute their part of the hardware. Of course, that has gotten us into trouble because consequently they ran out of money. But that’s part of any entrepreneur’s riverboat gamble. You win some, you lose some. Both Russia and the U.S. have suffered as a result of Russia’s faltering economy.

But I think there is evidence of things turning the corner. I think the Russians see us as strong partners in achieving long–term economic success and their move toward a democratic market economy. The space station has been one of many mechanisms that have aided and abetted that process. Considering the $30 billion per year we spent in the arms race against them, the cost of a few of these alternative activities gets pretty cheap.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

What have been your disappointments?

When I started to sit down and write a letter about unfinished business, as I promised the President, it turned out to be a pretty damn long letter. There are many things you would like to get done, but the reality of our democratic society is that we have built a government which, by design, keeps you from moving very fast or very far, unless you really are up against the wall.

So in a lot of the things that I would have liked to have seen happen, like solving the nuclear waste problem, and making greater progress on arms control, there have been personal disappointments. I’ve also been very discouraged at times with the lack of political conservative support for maintaining a vigorous science and technology program.

ACCESS TO THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

How often did you see the President?

The relationship between the science and technical advisor and the President varies with the personalities. President Kennedy and Jerry Wiesner had a longstanding, close personal relationship that carried over into Weisner’s term in the White House. In contrast President Nixon was quite wary of the science community and ultimately shipped Guy Stever over to the National Science Foundation. Allan Bromley had a good relationship with President Bush but tended to be fenced out by Chief of Staff John Sununu who, given that he was an engineer, saw little need for additional technical input to the President.

In serving as agent for both the President and Vice President for science and technology policy I had direct access as required. This ranged from meetings lasting from a few minutes up to an hour, to phone calls, and written communications. In addition to ad hoc meetings on specific subjects I had regular one–on–one meetings with the Vice President, typically once every two weeks, and a weekly exchange with the President in the form of a memo which he would annotate and return to me.

In my meetings with the President and Vice President—and frequently both were present—the subjects covered included the redesign and internationalization of the space station, our position to support the superconducting supercollider (which Congress killed), the decision to continue the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, the disposition of plutonium from dismantled warheads, global climate change, increased budgetary support for scientific research, creating the National Science and Technology Council, and establishing several other important advisory groups, including the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

In addition there were many ceremonial occasions in which I briefed the President and was in his company. Believe me, he is deeply engaged in the substance of his work.

Is Vice President Gore the de facto chairman of the Science and Technology Council?

No, the President is chair, the Vice President in his absence. Otherwise I was the de facto chair. A lot of people have funny notions about these councils, for instance that they meet as a group all the time. I was a member of the National Security Council, the Economic Council, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Science and Technology Council. In my 5 years plus at the White House only once did all the members of a Council meet and that was when President Clinton attended the ceremonial opening of the Science and Technology Council to give it its charge. These Councils work by involving only the appropriate agencies and officials at the appropriate levels, so that you tap only the expertise needed to get a problem solved. Otherwise, you waste people’s time. It’s a matter of keeping everybody informed, but engaging them personally only to the extent needed. This is the modus we’ve had in the Science and Technology Council. So I sometimes gripe that people somehow measure the effectiveness of the Science and Technology Council by how often it met in plenary session with the President.

Has the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) proven effective?

It is helping the President fulfill his goals in research and efficient government by leading the various agencies to more tightly integrated programs. It incorporates a great number of important science and technology programs that spill across agency boundaries. The President wanted to have a council at the cabinet level that could ensure that such programs are well thought–out, well integrated, with their budgets prepared in concert, resulting in a situation where the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts.

NEW GENERATION OF VEHICLES

There is for instance the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) or “Clean Car initiative,” which is a smoothly operating group of seven agencies (Energy, Commerce, NASA, Defense, EPA, the National Science Foundation, plus the NSTC) working with the big three auto companies plus their suppliers. The goal of PNGV is to achieve a quantum improvement in passenger vehicles—in terms of mileage and emissions—under public–private joint sponsorship over a decade of time.

Is this a prime example of a “virtual agency”?

I think it is. It is a virtual agency project in which the best resources of each of the agencies—all of whom have relevant assets and stakeholder interest—are drawn together.

If you look into this program from the industry side, say you are General Motors, you see one place where you can go in dealing with the Executive Branch. You go to the Under–Secretary (Technology) of the Department of Commerce and it is there that all seven of these agencies come together and work as a virtual, single, one–stop shop for the federal government. If you look from the government side to the industry side, you find a one–stop shop at U.S. Car, which is a consortium of Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, and major suppliers. So you have these two nodes where people are brought together to work on milestones, on performance reviews, and on priority decisions about where money is going to be spent. Annually the National Research Council brings together a group to critique the whole program.

What’s your role in this virtual agency?

Well, the Vice President and I put it together. The President and Vice President are both very supportive of the partnership and were essential actors in persuading the people from the industry that we were in this for the long term necessary to make it work. I gratefully witnessed the Vice President and the CEOs of the three big motor companies finally put the deal together.

From that point onward we provided encouragement and support from the White House—a catalytic influence that none of the individual agencies could have provided until we chartered the coordinating office under Under Secretary Mary Good at the Department of Commerce.

You can’t run a program from inside the White House because you don’t have the resources. However you can be the catalyst and convening authority across the agencies and between government and the private sector.

How did you track this program from day to day and from month to month?

I convened monthly meetings with key members from the agencies. In a similar vein over the past several years, we built other virtual agencies. For instance, we have a group of about a dozen and a half agencies all working on natural disaster issues, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. Now the work is orchestrated in a single operation, headquartered in the Federal Emergency Management Administration. FEMA annually reviews the research process, monitors programs, and ensures that the practitioners have access to research work as well as influence on the research agenda.

The same is true for global climate change, the program which Allan Bromley started. There is now an inter–agency review of all of the work related to global climate change science. This, again, is staffed by several full–time people pulling together the work of all the agencies. Basically, it’s under the National Science Foundation, and it provides a continuing oversight of the program’s direction and budget priorities.

Does the National Science and Technology Council have clout on budget allocations?

We decided that it would just be an unproductive fight to take money away from agencies and then give it back. That’s maybe the Machiavellian way to go, but we decided we would work with the agencies on a collegial basis and sit in with OMB at all of the budget reviews. The Director of OMB and myself each year would write a letter to all of the heads of agencies about what the President’s priorities are in science and technology. The agencies are expected to pay attention to that.

If they don’t, when their budgets come in for the first round of review, they’ll be reminded of his priorities and have to go back and readjust their requests. No system is perfect, but we have found this to work rather well in that the agencies now understand more clearly than ever before what the President’s priorities are.

Going back to the Clean Car initiative, wasn’t the goal to produce a production prototype offering a three–fold increase in gas mileage?

Yes, plus very low emissions and a high recyclability of components. Where does the program stand? We are doing very well. You can see advances already showing up in the current models, in new materials and improved efficiencies. Energy–absorbing materials allow a higher degree of safety while reducing the weight of the car. Less weight means better performance.

Progress is being made in advanced locomotion concepts. For instance, you can’t achieve PNGV’s three–fold mileage goal by just incremental improvements. You must incorporate new technologies that private industry cannot undertake by itself, given the characteristics of the marketplace. One of the largest and most surprising advances over these last five years is improvement of the fuel cell. A few years ago people used to think of fuel cells as something that you put in space ships where “gold plated” technology has been the norm. Today however, because of rapidly advancing technologies, fuel cells are quickly being prepared for the commercial market in transportation and power. Many of the fuel cell advances have come out of the federal national labs, working cooperatively with the auto and energy industry.

Another advance has been the development of hybrid vehicles, especially a diesel–electric vehicle with a four–stroke direct injection diesel engine combined with advanced batteries and regeneration of electricity from brake systems. In short, we’re putting in place the technology that will be the technology for the automotive industry in the twenty–first century. The goal is a production prototype by around 2005 or 2006.

Is each of the Big Three developing its own Clean Car?

Yes. Industry knows the value of both cooperation and competition. You can see the companies working away in cooperative research, and then one or more of them will say, “Well, we don’t think we ought to be working on this idea any longer under the partnership because we’ve got some things we want to do ourselves."

That means they are getting close to making a competitive market decision and want to be able to pursue the idea on a discretionary basis. They know exactly when it’s time to peel out of the partnership and go into head to head competition. And that’s exactly the way we want it.

There seems to be a strong market preference for big cars like the sport utility vehicles. How will you get the public to accept the prototype if it’s a smaller car?

I remember that when the President first came into office in 1993 we persuaded him that we should try for an 18 cent–a–gallon tax on gasoline. We worked hard with our friends in the Congress, spilled blood all over the place, and I think we finally got a 4 cent–a–gallon increase out of it. There is this non–rational feeling about cheap gasoline that has helped propel us along the direction of using a 300–horsepower, two–ton monster to go to the grocery store. There’s the mental image abetted by slick advertising that you need to climb Pike’s Peak in the snow.

I think it’s just part of a superficial response of Americans to a good economy, cheap gasoline, and a lot of machismo. I would hope we can soon come to our senses. You know gasoline actually costs us the same as it does in any other country until you get to the pump. There the price goes way up overseas because they know the real cost of depending on imported fuels and they put that cost into the price via taxes. So people overseas pay $3–$4 per gallon, yet get along without great hardship.

Our own gasoline prices are lower than they have ever been. And our dependence on imported oil is now worse now than ever. We must put in place options for the twenty–first century that will enable us in reasonably short time to shift the nature and the efficiency of our economic system to meet new conditions, whether they be imposed by Arab embargoes or by big problems like global climate change.

It’s the best insurance policy we could possibly buy. In the ‘70s and ‘80s we began investing in energy efficiency. We are now 35 percent more energy efficient than we were in the early ‘70s. We’ve saved money every step of the way, received environmental benefits, and slowed the growth of our dependence on oil imports.

Must the public be coerced in some sense into facing these rational solutions?

Well, we always coerce ourselves. It is known as government. I think at some point we as a nation are going to have to come to grips with what underpricing a commodity does to you.

In establishing these virtual agencies have you had some success in getting collaboration between the national labs and corporations?

Yes. The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles uses the DOE labs quite a bit, also some of the EPA labs and NASA labs. One reason I pushed in this direction was I knew, having worked in a national lab, and having started a few businesses, that there was a kind of a C.P. Snow problem of “two cultures.” Not natural science and political science, but the research environment and culture of a national laboratory and government research institution as opposed to the culture in a profit–making private corporation. You have to look at things differently. You begin to understand each other’s business and perspectives because both perspectives are valid. But these people really never got to know each other before. Now there’s much better communication. They understand better how each other thinks and also how to access the knowledge each possesses. I think it’s working very well.

At one point there were problems about patents and things like that, weren’t there?

I think we’ve gotten much more sensible about intellectual property rights. We used to say that the government would patent everything it invented and then lock the patents up. That doesn’t do anybody any good. So the new approach is that private sector people are to have access to intellectual property to the extent they have been involved in investing in it and developing it. I honestly haven’t heard any big patent problems for several years.

THE FUTURE OF THE NATIONAL WEAPONS LABS

Have the three weapons labs, Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos, made enough progress in converting to a post–Cold War environment to ensure their survival?

What ensured their survival is called “stockpile stewardship” of nuclear weapons. There was a bargain drawn between the weapons labs and, I’d say the rest of the community, that they would go along with no nuclear weapons testing and still be able to annually certify the reliability and safety of the stockpile—provided they have certain capabilities for non–explosive testing of weapons and weapons components. This is now a $4.5 billion–a–year business that includes the National Ignition Facility and other activities. That’s a pretty penny and underscores the cost of nuclear deterrence.

There are many critics out there who think the stewardship program is out to develop new weapons.

There is always going to be some bright person who says, “Hey, I think we can design a better nuclear weapon.” That is the very nature of inquiry. But what we’re saying is, we’re not interested. We are interested in the safety and reliability of the stockpile we possess; but not in the business of designing new weapons. That’s the bottom line.

ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT

I know you have been very interested over the years in arms controls and disarmament. Some sixty retired generals and admirals from this country and other countries have advocated the ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons. What about that? Is that a reasonable goal?

I think it is a very sound cart to hitch our horses to, knowing in my own heart of hearts that it is highly unlikely that we’ll ever actually get there. But a goal should be lofty. I think the more realistic but still optimistic goal is as follows. We, the U.S. and Russia, ratify Start II, then immediately begin work on Start III. If the Congress and the Duma approve, then we will move into a phase in which we further reduce our inventories to perhaps 1,000 nuclear weapons apiece.

Of course that is still a lot of weapons, but it is less than 10 percent of where we are starting from. As you get down to that level of weapons, it’s not just the U.S. and the former Soviet Union anymore, it’s several other nuclear weapons states as well. So it gets to be a much more complicated calculus when we move down to very, very low levels of nuclear weapons. I don’t think we’re smart enough to figure out how we move through that phase yet but we must persevere.

I believe U.S. policy should revolve around abolition as our ultimate goal, but let’s start by reducing our inventory and improving command and control for what we have, especially in Russia, then start thinking about the next steps.

Strategic arms control is a process, not a single decision. In order to make this happen we’ve been working very hard on building confidence, transparency, and reciprocity with Russia. There is a trust–building process going on between their labs and our labs that I think has resulted in enormous advances in Russia’s willingness to work with us on their inventory, as well as on control and accountability of their weapons.

We now have an agreed–upon process of monitoring and assuring each other that warheads are being eliminated and that the plutonium and enriched uranium are in fact moving toward use for nuclear power. I agree with General Lee Butler that abolition ought to be our goal. But, I think we have a lot of other steps to take before we can face that one directly.

Well, for General Butler and others an all–important intermediate step is getting all weapons off alert status.

Yes, and I agree.

The administration has been criticized quite a bit for not moving more in that direction.

Well, don’t forget we also have another prize out there known as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If we start marching too fast toward taking things off alert, there are a lot of conservatives in the Congress who will redouble their efforts to kill the test ban treaty, quite honestly. I agree with the President, let’s get this Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty done, and then let’s turn and talk about other things we can be doing as follow on.

Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institution, who used to work for me at OTA, has proposed that we actually not just change the software that targets the destination of the missiles, which you can always reprogram pretty quickly, but that we actually remove warheads from the top of the missiles and store them some distance away, doing it in a way that’s monitorable by national technical means.

Another thing, Matthew Bunn of Harvard (another of my former staff people) has just described in the Federation of American Scientists Public Interest Report a procedure called “pit stuffing.” You stuff iron wire down a hole in the plutonium pit which prevents an implosion from happening. Thus you would get no significant nuclear yield if the weapon went off. What Bunn has proposed is that we use this method, which could be done verifiably both in Russia and in the U.S., to very quickly get these pits to the point that they can’t be used.

I suppose, in principle, it would be reversible.

Well, no, not without taking it apart, and that’s a lot of work.

GLOBAL WARMING

What is your present evaluation of the global warming hypothesis? Has the case for massively reducing use of fossil fuels gotten stronger in the five years you were in office?

Yes. Massive reduction of carbon release taking place in the twenty–first century, but not in the next year or two. Our concern is that we act promptly to allow time for capital stock turnover in a reasonable amount of time, so we don’t artificially depreciate capital stock.

Also, that we make major and continuing investments in R&D for advanced technologies for low net carbon fuels and very high efficiency use of energy, for our own benefit and to help other countries along the same path. Over roughly the first half of the twenty–first century we should be able to economically move to a much less carbon–intensive energy system. It can be done. We are in the best position to lead this transformation—and we owe it to the developing world and future generations.

Is this going to give nuclear power a second chance?

Well, it brings up the question, what low–net carbon energy resources do you use? There are only a few of those. Fission, fusion, and renewables.

I’m pushing ocean thermal energy conversion. This is the “sleeper” technology.

I’ve read your paper about that.

There is enough solar input into the tropical oceans to take care of ten times the current world requirements for energy.

The quantity is there. The problem we have in moving beyond an R&D stage is that you get into big capital pretty quickly and you’ve got to have markets willing to furnish the capital, and earn a return. If the market prices (which include subsidies, etc.) won’t make it fly, then it won’t fly. I believe that some energy supplies merit subsidy because they don’t cause external environmental costs. But one must be very judicious in going down that path!

Is improved energy efficiency going to be, in the end, the most important answer to our energy problem and the CO₂ problem?

It’s going to be a big one. The Chinese say that their cheapest new energy source is efficiency and they are right. There is still lots to be gained there. Even in the U.S., which is much more efficient, we have had a 35 percent improvement in efficiency at a time when energy prices basically have been falling. What if prices had been going up? We could have exceeded 50 percent by now. I think as far as we can see there’s no limit to the opportunities, especially if the real or perceived price signals are there. In terms of the physical evidence of climate change, I think there is no single footprint like there was for stratospheric ozone. But there are about a half dozen things that all point in the same direction. The IPCC [International Protocol on Climate Change] experts are convinced that we now pretty much understand the basic radiative forcing by greenhouse gasses, or the physical nature and effect of these gasses in trapping heat.

We also more fully understand what has happened in the past. We know the role of aerosols. We know the effects of volcanos. We understand certain astronomical and orbital phenomena that affect climate. We certainly need to better understand the effect of clouds and the biosphere system response to global warming, but we are really getting pretty doggone elegant compared to a decade ago. In short, I think we are beginning to understand how the earth works, how it has behaved in the past, and how it will respond to future changes.

All the results that are coming in are basically consistent with expectations. That is very disquieting, because it says that we don’t have all that much time to start implementing proper conservation measures. We need a major transformation of our energy system within about 50 years. This means we can’t afford to sit on our hands any longer.

NUCLEAR REACTORS

With the present nuclear reactors do you think there will be license extensions?

Yes, I think there will. There are some issues such as embrittlement of pressure vessels to be resolved, but I hope that is manageable. Consider the fact that 20 to 22 percent of our electricity is now nuclear. Suppose that power had to come from coal power plants. That would greatly magnify our CO2 problem over the next decade and a half. There is a real opportunity here for those who appreciate the potential of nuclear power.

I said 20 years ago, and I say it again today, what we don’t need is a brand–new process for generating electricity from nuclear energy. We would also be wise not to embark on a new chemical reprocessing of spent fuel for recovery and use of plutonium. What’s needed is to show that nuclear power can steadily advance toward a process–safe system that is not so heavily dependent on engineered safeguards.

We need nuclear plants so dependable that people will yawn whenever anyone speaks of a safety “event.” Until we have that, we won’t have gained the public confidence in this technology necessary for it to expand much beyond where it is now.

FUSION ENERGY

What about fusion? Does that have promise?

I worked on fusion for a year when it was still classified secret back in the ‘60s. It was called “Project Sherwood.” They were thinking of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest and of robbing the rich oceans of deuterium and giving the people free energy. But a friend who explained how Project Sherwood got its name said that for him it meant, “It sure would be nice if it would work.”

I think that is still an apt name for fusion. We have come a long way in plasma science, key materials technologies, and in the physics of fusion. But we don’t have a clear consensus on optimum configurations and geometries. Materials technologies that can handle fast neutron fluxes are still in a very distant future. And we have a long way to go to build a plant system that has the size, resilience, and dependability that is absolutely required by the electricity industry. Fusion has a long way to go, but there are so few energy options I think it is well worth continuing as insurance for the future.

You think support for it will continue?

Yes, at around $200 million a year or so for the U.S., and we are about 20 percent of the world effort. The Japanese are probably the largest single contributor. But in my opinion the future of nuclear fusion or fission depends on our continuing to explore how far you can go with efficiency and renewable (ultimately, solar) energy. If you run into some real fundamental limits on renewable energies, that will in turn throw the burden much more heavily on to nuclear power. If, on the other hand, we continue making headway on efficiency and renewables, they could get doggone attractive early in the twenty–first century.

RENEWABLES

What are the most promising of the renewable technologies?

One that has come of age is windpower. That already has a number of niche markets now. Globally, we have multi–gigawatts of production of windpower now. There is mammoth wind–energy potential in a region north of Beijing, of many gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to an oil field. So there are places where it will work. As John Brown of British Petroleum has pointed out, direct solar conversion to electricity is another renewable of high promise. The production of solar cells keeps growing at about 30 percent a year.

The technology continues to improve and has a great advantage of being able to expand its market by filling new niches as prices fall. Starting with little niches, with little production, and then expanding to bigger niches with bigger production.

Is there any possibility of rooftops over a good part of the country being covered with solar cells?

Well, a hundred years from now I think it’s very possible. We’ve recently learned how to make shingles out of amorphous silicon. The Japanese are going strongly in the direction of solar energy. The President has announced support to enable installing a million solar roof tops in the U.S. That is not very many, maybe one out of 80. But, again, if by public policies and by technological ingenuity, you can lower the cost of doing these things, then more people are going to do them. And the more they do them, the lower the price is going to get.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

How do you account for the contradiction between the preeminence of our University system and research capabilities, on the one hand, and our lackluster public schools on the other hand?

It’s hard to say. A lot of people in our universities are from other countries. Many come better prepared than our own students. The universities and colleges are by and large governed by boards of trustees and governors that are very different from your local school board. In college–level science and math the criteria for competent teaching are stringent compared to what is expected if you are teaching science or math in a high school. The number of trained scientists teaching science in our secondary schools is minuscule, and the same in mathematics.

I don’t think one can say that we don’t have to worry about our K to 12 because we have strong universities. That just puts more of the burden of under–prepared students on universities, as we have already put a burden on industry. Industry has to give too many people remedial math to be able to employ them. That’s not getting a good return for our investment in K to 12 education. I think national standards for performance, for achievement, is a terribly important thing because we have a society that is highly mobile. So this ideological notion that somehow you shouldn’t test kids nationally for achievement in basic skills like reading and mathematics tells me that something is really wrong.

What about testing the teachers themselves?

Well, I have suggested that the first thing to do is test the teachers using the very tests they give the students and see how well the teachers do. There is resistance in any profession to having outsiders help decide how you stack up. Hopefully, the teachers will do it internally as part of their own development.

From your close association with Vice President Gore, possibly the next Democratic presidential candidate, what more can you say about him?

Well he is to me an absolutely extraordinary figure. His ability to intellectually engage an issue and respond creatively—not just listen, but to become substantively involved—is astonishing. That’s one reason I’ve considered my job such a joy. It’s nice to work with people who have that kind of ability. Al Gore has a deep and abiding commitment to the proposition that science and technology can provide the options that will enable us to grow economically, protect ourselves environmentally, and provide for the future.

DEMISE OF THE OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT

What’s your commentary on the congressional action a few years ago to abolish the Office of Technology Assessment, which you directed for 13 years?

I think it was a political move by some of the freshman members of the 104th Congress wanting a scalp to show how they can “cut government.” They picked on a congressional agency that was just about the smallest and least politically protected agency of them all, namely OTA. A lot of these members did not, and do not, recognize the value of analysis. They see it as leading to paralysis, so they said, “We just don’t need OTA. We already know what needs to be done.” And others said, “Well, it does good work but it is just not that useful.” Time and time again since it was eliminated we get calls for OTA reports.

So I feel very sad that it was lost. There are a lot of members, including Gingrich, Houghton, Rockefeller, and a bunch of other people that are wondering what they could do about reestablishing some mechanism for the members and the committees to access trustworthy information about science and technology in a useful and timely way.

But you don’t think OTA can be recreated?

Maybe it can to a degree, but you can’t step into the same river twice. I don’t want to dismiss it entirely. I shouldn’t say much more about that because I’m still pretty upset that it received such callous treatment.

FUTURE PLANS

What will you be doing now?

I’m going to be the Compton Lecturer at MIT this fall. I’m also going to try some entrepreneurial work in the private sector, participate in some academic activities, and be an advisor in the NGO [nongovernmental organizations] community.

Did we touch on all subjects important to you? Is there anything else you wish to say or emphasize?

I am very concerned that we move toward sustainable systems in the twenty–first century. That is a pivotal century and it will be the moment of truth for humanity, with climate change being but one of many factors. Human population growth is still a monstrous issue. Unless we deal squarely with moving to equilibrium on human population you can forget about the rest of it.

Lord Bertram Russell once said that “mankind would rather commit suicide than learn arithmetic.” Ultimately we have to learn some arithmetic. If we can work on sustainability as an overarching long–term goal, sort of like Lee Butler’s zero nuclear weapons goal, then you can tackle population growth. You can tackle the resources consumed per unit of GNP produced. You can tackle biodiversity. You can tackle ecosystem services which may turn out to be about two–thirds of our total global wealth, and yet are outside our economic calculus. If we can begin to get some of those things in hand in the twenty–first century then it will be a good century.

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