Category: General

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Superstorm Sandy was a kind of storm scientists don’t understand well.

Recently I wrote at Slate Magazine about Superstorm Sandy as she barreled into Maryland. It was 10 am and my editor  just asked me to write about whether Sandy’s enormous size was related to climate change. Or, should we assume all storms have a global warming component because climate change has altered the playing field?

Lights flickered and sirens blared in my neighborhood. I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost power. So the interviews happened in quick succession. I first reached MIT’s Kerry Emmanuel, who explained to me that Sandy was a hybrid storm–a rare combination of enormous hurricane and powerful winter storm. From my story:

Emmanuel: It is correct to say that in no individual [weather] event can you really make an attribution to anything, whether it is climate change or El Nino or your grandmother had her tooth pulled this morning. You just can’t do it for a single event. It is just the nature of the game. Now, Sandy is an example of what we call a hybrid storm. It works on some of the same principles as the way hurricanes work but it also works on the same principles as winter storms work. Hurricanes and winter storms are powered by completely different energy sources. The hurricane is powered by the evaporation of sea water. Winter storms are powered by horizontal temperature contrasts in the atmosphere. So hybrid storms are able to tap into both energy sources. That’s why they can be so powerful.

An hour later I reached NCAR climate scientist Kevin Trenberth in Colorado. He explained that a few inches of sea level rise had the potential to make Sandy even more catastrophic. Most scientists seem to be reluctant to tie a single storm to climate change, but sea level rise is much more clearly climate-related and disastrous. It doesn’t take much for an extreme event with a little bit of extra sea level to overtop coastal defenses. I asked Trenberth: What should we expect with Sandy?

Trenberth: You have this picture sometimes that sea level is going up at this slow rate of 3 millimeters per year. You stand there and you watch, and finally it gets up to your toes or it gets up to your ankles. You think finally, I better do something about this. That’s not the way it works. Sea level-rise happens episodically. One minute it looks benign and then a week later suddenly a storm or hurricane comes along like Sandy, and there are major waves, 20-foot waves, and major storm surge, and tremendous damage occurs.

He went on to say:

Even if the storm just happened to do exactly the same things it’s doing anyway, the fact that sea level went up 6 inches last century, and that sea level is somewhat higher now than it has been at any time in recent history, means that all of the coastal regions are experiencing new levels of pounding and erosion. I expect there could be some quite surprising events along some of the coast as a result of that.

In my story headlined Hybrid Hell published at Slate Magazine (their Science and Health section is excellent, check it out!), you can read the complete interviews that I tapped out on my keyboard as water flooded my basement and tree limbs fell around my house.

 

 

 

 

 


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Climate Concerns in Boardrooms, But in Business Magazines?

Mention the words business risk and climate change to Howard Kunreuther of Penn’s Wharton School, and he’ll tell you about big changes in risk management in the corporate world. Yet major business periodicals appear to lag behind corporate boardrooms in increasing the awareness of risks posed by a changing climate.

In a story headlined Risky Business, published recently at The Yale Forum, I took a look at how U.S. businesses now are facing major changes in their assessment of catastrophic risk. Floods and droughts are increasingly coming into focus. Supply chain management is now a big concern, because natural hazards around the world can disrupt business at home. Here is how the story begins:

As little as ten years ago, few of the world’s largest corporations issued sustainability strategies to shareholders, reported on greenhouse gas emissions, or disclosed climate change risks. Today, more than 80 percent do.

But while catastrophic risk and sustainability concerns associated with climate change now are increasingly reflected on corporate agendas, leading business magazines — no doubt suffering some of the same economic and growth challenges facing mass media overall — show little real appetite for substantive climate-related reporting.

Nevertheless, climate news important to the business sector clearly is happening. For the first time, G20 leaders put disaster risk management on the agenda at their 2012 summit in Mexico. And U.S. corporations have made substantial progress on emission reduction goals, according to a September 2012 report by the Carbon Disclosure Project, a system for companies to measure and disclose environmental information. As emissions reductions and physical risks of climate change — including drought, wildfires, and floods — raise concerns in boardrooms and among finance ministers in the world’s richest countries, business press coverage appears not to be meeting needs, leaving things to specialized high-priced “insider” newsletters to fill the void.

 I admire the reporting and writing skills of many of the business journalists mentioned in my article and hope they will pursue these big stories, but they will also need the support and backing of their managing editors. You can read the complete story here.
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Digging into climate change, students find more than science

To find the vanguard of climate education in the United States, keep an eye on four teachers in Maryland’s Wicomico County public school district.

Using field trips, editorial cartoons, even parent objections, they’re taking climate change far from the science classroom.

By Lisa Palmer
for the Daily Climate

BERLIN, Md. – Fifth grader Aman Shahzad looked closely at the level attached to the plumb line. “Lower, lower,” she called out. “OK! The bubble is in the middle.” Her classmate, holding the wooden surveyor’s pole, read the measurement: 14 centimeters.

The two students were from Pemberton Elementary School in nearby Salisbury, Md., the first to participate in a new, three-month interdisciplinary unit called “Investigating Climate Science” that spans science, math, economics and government. On this day in early spring on Maryland’s eastern shore, they were on a field trip to Assateague Island, measuring the slope of the beach as the first step in a lesson on sea-level rise.

The unit represents the vanguard of a nationwide effort, pushed by education and science groups, to broaden climate change education

The unit represents the vanguard of a nationwide effort, pushed by education and science groups, to broaden climate change education into a variety of physical and social science classes in public school curricula.

Yet even here, in one the most sophisticated climate change education units in the nation, teachers still feel the need to balance what the world’s scientific bodies know about climate change with what is represented in the public dialogue, avoiding terms like “global warming” and including a lesson questioning humanity’s impact on the problem.

Honing critical thinking

The three-month unit is designed for middle school and high-achieving elementary students. It was developed by four teachers in theWicomico County Public Schools’ gifted and talented program, with help from environmental educator Carrie Samis of the Maryland Coastal Bays Program. Lessons focus on climate science and hone critical thinking skills.

    • In one lesson, students examined and analyzed editorial cartoons related to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of building a pipeline to ferry crude oil from Alberta’s tarsands to the United States.
    • Another lesson examined the possible causes of changing climates, differentiating between anthropogenic and natural ones. Students studied greenhouse gases, climate indicators, and carbon footprints, then predicted positive and negative effects climate change may have on agriculture, the economy, infrastructure and wildlife.
    • GabeDuhn-400The full-day field trip to Assateague Island showed students how vulnerable the barrier island is to sea-level rise. They conducted a mock debate, acting as local stakeholders, on the impacts of salt marsh migration.
    • One lesson, called “the controversy,” probes “both sides of the story.” It examines uncertainties in historic data, fossil records, ice core samples and tree rings, posing the questions, “How do we know?” and “Where is the proof?”
    • Several lessons are devoted to developing climate action plans and deciding what – if anything – students should do about climate change.

The diversified approach reaches and engages students via a number of different avenues. Gabe Dunn, a fifth grader at Westside Intermediate School, in Hebron, Md., liked the unit’s hands-on science and civics activities, especially debating the viability of land development amid marsh migration and sea-level rise. Cade Stone, a fifth grader at Pemberton Elementary, found the editorial cartoons appealing.

A need for ‘balance’

The unit has generated controversy.

Months before the lessons began, parents voiced concern over the contents and stressed a need for “balance.” Virtually every scientist studying atmospheric and earth sciences says climate change is real and that humans are the cause. But some parents sought inclusion of opposing theories, such as other causes and doubts that climate change is occurring.

Teachers need to discern what is credible and not credible, and part of the job of teachers is to provide signposts to that end.

– Susan Buhr, University of Colorado

In response, Nancy Rowe, one of four teachers developing the unit, devised lessons to show that climate change is not all caused by humans. “We want to be balanced,” Rowe said.

That desire of balance lead the program’s creators to avoid terms like “climate change” or “global warming” in lesson plans, Rowe said, “which would have sent a biased point of view.”

Scientists and educators who conduct workshops for teachers on climate change say this “false-balance” is not the correct approach.

“Human activities are the drivers of recent climate change,” said Susan Buhr, a climate scientist and director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado. “Teachers need to discern what is credible and not credible, and part of the job of teachers is to provide signposts to that end.”

‘Science has to lead’

Debate over the tradeoffs and values of how to respond to climate change is appropriate for environmental education, Buhr and other educators say. However, the strong evidence that supports the climate science and human causation of climate change doesn’t warrant equal weight with minority claims, often disputed by other research, that are not credible, they add. “Science has to lead,” Buhr said.

SurveyClass-550Teachers drafting the program said criticism – or the desire to avoid it – influenced their decision to include alternate views. Parental opposition may have been small, said Samis, who helped write the climate curriculum for the Wicomico students. But it “has been at the forefront of my mind the whole time.”

After a local newspaper reported a front-page news story of the Wicomico County schools’ field trip to Assateague, readers accused the teachers of “brainwashing the kids with biased information” that climate change is occurring. “That hurt,” Rowe said. “We are really trying to expose them to both sides so that they can make their own decision about what to think.”

Lively lessons

Buhr disagrees with efforts that allow kids to make their own decisions about established scientific conclusions. “We don’t ask students in science class to make up their own minds over whether they believe in photosynthesis or if the earth is round,” she said. “Why would we be doing that here?”

We aren’t hiding anything. The kids love seeing both sides of a story.
– Nancy Rowe, teacher

Still, the teachers note that teaching the controversy has made for lively lessons in civics, politics and skeptical thinking – part of the goal of the whole unit. And the science is getting through.

The field trip was proof of that.

On this unseasonably warm March day, 160 students on a field trip from the Wicomico County gifted and talented program learned how climate change, sea level rise, and salt marsh migration will affect Maryland’s coastal areas. They also learned about economic, cultural, and social policies and decisions that local land owners, farmers, watermen, developers, and elected officials may have to make as the climate changes.

Science is really a process of discovery, of skepticism, of challenging long-held constructs, and controversy. By addressing parental concerns, discussing the different newspaper stories and linking student experiments to real-world situations, Rowe and her colleagues are, in effect, teaching the kids how to do science.

“We aren’t hiding anything,” Rowe said. “The kids love seeing both sides of a story.”

© Lisa Palmer 2012. All rights reserved.

Lisa Palmer is a freelance reporter in Maryland. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Nature Climate Change, Fortune, and The Yale Forum, among other outlets. DailyClimate.org is a foundation-funded news service that covers climate change.

Photos of Wicomico County Public Schools students on a field trip to Assateague Island © Lisa Palmer.

This story was originally published by The Daily Climate.

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Climate science education graduates to the next level

The science of global warming has opened rifts in U.S. classrooms like evolution before it, but teaching it differently may improve science literacy overall

By Lisa Palmer

BALTIMORE—Ninth grade science at the Academy for Career and College Education began the usual way last fall. Victoria Matthew’s students learned the difference between biotic and abiotic characteristics, then progressed to the basics of scientific method. By Thanksgiving, they were ready for climate change. That’s when Matthew braced herself.

“Initially, I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from the kids, said Matthew, a teacher at the inner-city charter school for grades six through 12. “But I didn’t encounter any. I was surprised.”

Like teaching evolution, efforts to improve climate science lessons have opened rifts in classrooms and school districts across the United States. Parents have pressured teachers not to teach the subject. Teachers have watered down the science. Special interests – from the Heartland Institute on the right to Facing the Future on the left – have vied to influence curriculum. Some states and districts have ignored the topic altogether. Others insist on a “balanced” debate that pits a small minority of scientists who deny human-driven climate change against the findings of nearly all earth and atmospheric scientists.

But the landscape is changing rapidly and profoundly in public schools.picture of classroomImage: Wikimedia Commons/Canadian2006

Earlier this month, the education-based nonprofit Achieve, Inc. released draft “next generation science standards” for elementary, middle- and high-school classrooms. Developed from recommendations by the National Research Council, the standards represent the first comprehensive revision of U.S. science curricula in 15 years. They highlight “cross-cutting” concepts that touch various disciplines, giving students a  “cumulative, coherent and usable understanding” of science and engineering. Climate change plays a key role.

Groups are stepping forward to buttress climate science in schools, pushing to ensure the topic is well-represented in new national science standards. Science and education leaders are seeking ways to broaden climate science from a narrow unit of earth science curriculum into an interdisciplinary subject taught across a variety of physical and social science classes.

The hope is that, if educators can effectively teach the nuance and complexity of climate change, the gains would bolster larger efforts to improve science education overall, aiding literacy and critical thinking.

“The reality of climate change is that it’s utterly interdisciplinary,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Effective climate change education … has to have strong earth science, biology and physics components, and it has to connect to social science, history, psychology, and economics. It has to answer ‘How did we get into this pickle?'”

Two problems with climate change make it a subject teachers are loath to teach: Climate change is complex – touching on economic, social, political and scientific issues to a far greater degree than most other science topics. And climate change politics put teachers square in the middle of an ideological battle.

Climate science is now taught in many districts in the earth science curriculum, mostly in middle school grades. Left there, it’s doomed for failure, Niepold said. As students advance to high school, core science becomes specialized, displacing interdisciplinary, predominantly earth science-based concepts like climate change.

Statistics show that 83 percent of U.S. high school students take biology, 50 percent take chemistry, 20 percent take physics, and just 20 percent take earth science courses, said Niepold. “Even if the earth science classes were amazingly effective, we’re only reaching 20 percent of all high school students.”

More troubling, earth science is frequently reserved for kids not destined for college, said Niepold. Many college-bound high school students are fast-tracked through biology, chemistry, physics, and advanced placement science classes, skipping the topic. As a result, college-bound seniors can emerge from high school without much exposure to climate science.

“Climate change should be everywhere in the curriculum, but as a result of its complexity it is nowhere,” said Jill Karsten, program director for education and diversity at the geosciences directorate of the National Science Foundation.

The push to broaden climate science curricula brings up the second problem: By embedding climate change into an economics or ecology lesson, schools and teachers expose themselves to charges that they’re politicizing the classroom.

Roberta Johnson, executive director of Boulder, Colo.-based National Earth Science Teachers Association, recalls an incident reported by an Indiana teacher on a recent survey: The teacher had started a climate change unit. A parent, angry at the lesson plan, threatened to commandeer the classroom and dispute the legitimacy of the science. The teacher, thinking the dispute could lead to a useful discussion on science and truth, welcomed a debate. But before any such thing could happen, school administrators killed the entire unit.

That teacher’s struggle is not unique, Johnson noted. Last fall the association surveyed 555 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers across the United States who teach climate change. Forty percent said they were pressured not to teach climate change at all. A separate poll conducted by the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Va., found that 82 percent of high school and middle school science educators have faced skepticism about climate change from their students.

“It is disheartening to see the struggle teachers are having in the classroom,” Johnson said.

As of 2008, the latest year available, 29 states taught climate change directly, via a course that specifically covered it, according to an analysis by NOAA and the Technical Education Research Center for earth and space science education. Twelve others taught it indirectly – mentioning it, for example, in a chemistry lesson on greenhouse gases. Eight states failed to adequately address atmosphere, weather or climate concepts: Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Iowa had no state standards.

State laws in Texas, South Dakota, and Louisiana require that any lesson on climate science be balanced equally with instruction that other scientists dispute the consensus findings that society’s greenhouse gas emissions are altering planetary systems such as the atmosphere and oceans. The newest is in Tennessee, where state law, enacted in April, allows teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction. Gov. Bill Haslam, noting the bill passed the Legislature by a three-to-one margin, allowed the measure to become law despite misgivings, saying he did not believe the legislation “changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools.”

Tennessee, Texas and South Dakota aren’t alone.

In state legislatures and before local school boards across the country – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Washington State, Wyoming, Colorado, California, among others – political battles over the teaching of climate change in public schools have flared [Sidebar: Conflict abounds in climate education].

In many ways the political debate over climate science mirrors the fight to teach evolution theory, a battle that has been waged in the nation’s classrooms and courts since the Scopes’ Trial in 1925. But there is a key difference. The teaching of evolution today enjoys constitutional protections separating church from state. Unless all elements of the causes and impacts of climate change are clearly laid out in state standards, no legal mechanisms require that climate science be taught accurately.

Across the country, scientific accuracy is being compromised in schools, say science educators. Even when teachers and school districts include lessons on climate change, earnest teachers think teaching “both sides” of the climate debate is scientifically valid. The Earth Science Teachers Association survey found 36 percent of the teachers polled nationally had been urged to teach “both sides.” In southern states, 12 percent of those teachers said they were required to do so, whereas just 1 percent of teachers in the Northeast reported such a mandate.

“They tell us they need resources to teach ‘both sides’ of climate change well,” said Susan Buhr, who runs teacher workshops as director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado.

“From our perspective, there aren’t ‘both sides,'” she added. “There is the scientifically credible side, and then there is the misrepresentation side in the public dialogue.”

But other regions and states, including some with conservative-leaning politics such as West Virginia, have strong standards for earth science, said Mark McCaffrey, program director of the National Center for Science Education, which has long defended the teaching of evolution in public schools and earlier this year announced it would start doing the same for climate science. California and Massachusetts are among states viewed as progressive in climate science because they integrate climate literacy principles into the state standards.

In a California ninth grade ecology unit within biology class, for example, students might examine a 100-year survey of the state’s wildlife population to illustrate the impact climate change is having on animals today.

In Victoria Matthew’s biology class in Baltimore, students examined global ocean water temperatures and coral bleaching, and how that relates to climate change. A hands-on activity included an oyster dissection, and Matthew discussed how climate change is expected to impact oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay.

Efforts are underway to expand curriculum in classrooms. Among the most promising is an initiative underway in Maryland and Delaware, one of 15 test cases funded by the National Science Foundation to research ways to improve climate education [Sidebar: Joint science effort pushes climate education in Maryland and Delaware].

The test program encourages scientists and educators to work together to address local impacts – sea-level rise in the Chesapeake Bay, or rising temperatures in urban areas – and develop lessons that could apply elsewhere in the curriculum, said the study’s principal investigator Donald Boesch, of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Most information for educators focuses on global climate change, but Boesch said greater learning takes place when climate impacts are examined at the local level.

Similar climate education research programs focused on local impacts are being developed for Great Lakes and southeastern states.

But there is a larger goal here, educators say.

On May 11, the National Research Council, in coordination with the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Achieve released the draft Next Generation Science Standards, laying out key scientific ideas and practices all students should learn by the end of high school. Replacing standards issued more than a decade ago, the framework aims to connect knowledge from various disciplines into a “coherent and scientifically based” world view. Climate change factors highly in the effort, which emphasizes earth and space content as well as cross-cutting themes such as modeling, systems behavior, and uncertainty.

Educators say the push to improve the quality of climate change education would directly affect the 26 states that have partnered to develop the standards and could ripple through the entire educational system. Climate change, in effect, has become the poster child for what the National Academy of Sciences hopes to accomplish with science education.

“If we can get the standards … climate-rich, then that’s going to have a domino effect in getting into state standards, and getting into textbooks and curricula,” said Karsten at the National Science Foundation.

“That could be pretty catalytic.”

This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.

On the web:

National Center for Science Education

National Earth Science Teachers Assoc.

Facing the Future climate education materials

National Science Teacher’s Assoc. survey summary

National Research Council next generation science standards (draft)

National Research Council’s K-12 science education framework

Maryland-Delaware Climate Change Education, Assessment, and Research program

Great Lakes Climate Change Science and Education Network

Climate Literacy Project in the South East

TERC 2007 study on revolutionizing earth science education [pdf]

TERC 2008 analysis of state climate curricula

Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness project

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Green Business: The bottom line on sustainability

Last week I was in Lubbock, located in the southern high plains in West Texas, for the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The event is one of the professional development highlights of my year because I get to hear lectures and a wide range of viewpoints on the latest environmental hot topics. I also get to keep company with the best and brightest editors and reporters in North America.

On Saturday I moderated a panel called Green Business: The bottom line on tackling sustainability, featuring Al Halvorsen, senior director of environmental sustainability at PepsiCo; Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of water and insurance programs at Ceres; and Clint Wilder, senior editor at Clean Edge, Inc. and co-author of Clean Tech Nation. The panelists discussed a full range of sustainability issues, from supply chains, energy use and product planning to manufacturing facilities, natural resources and waste management.

A couple of key points from the panel:

-Sustainability is no longer an option for corporations; it’s a necessity.

-Companies are now influencing their communities to conserve resources.

-Challenges with financing and long term investments in clean tech are limiting this sector from scaling up.

What difficulties are you facing with long-term sustainability planning? I hope you’ll add your comment and join the conversation.

An audio file of the panel is here.

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Climate science education graduates to the next level

Like evolution, climate science has opened rifts in classrooms across the United States. Educators are lifting climate out of its narrow unit in middle school science – an effort, they hope, that will improve science literacy overall. Read the first in my two-part series.

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PETER GLEICK: What would it take to provide all people with access to clean water?

BY LISA PALMER

When PETER GLEICK is invited to give a speech, chances are good he’ll receive a cup of tap water to quench his thirst. “The people who put bottled water on the podium are increasingly embarrassed, and that’s good,” said Gleick recently in a speech at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Gleick, a hydrologist, is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif.

In 2003 he was named a MacArthur fellow for his work. He is the author of seven books, including the biennial water report, The World’s Water, which examines the most pressing freshwater issues; volume 7 of that series was published in October 2011. His book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, published in 2010, shows the journey of how water has moved from a free natural resource to a commercial product with multimillion-dollar ad budgets.

I recently caught up with Gleick and we talked about access to clean water. Here’s the interview that appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Momentum, a publication of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

A billion people worldwide are without access to drinking water, and 2.5 billion people are without access to adequate sanitation. What would it take to provide all people with access to clean water?

I think we have the technology. I think we have the money. I think we have the knowledge to meet basic human needs for everyone. What’s been missing is the commitment and the will on the part of local and national governments to meet those basic needs.

There’s this classic expression: It’s not rocket science. Part of the problem in the water world is that some of these issues are more complicated than rocket science because they are not technical issues; they are social and political issues, which are always harder than rocket science. Maybe the shortest answer is what’s really needed is a commitment to solve the problem. I am not that optimistic about it. I have been working on these issues a long time. In some ways we’ve made progress. I sometimes despair that we are going to make the commitments necessary to solve this problem.

What is keeping us from making the commitment?

It has to be the choice of communities or nations to put water issues at the top of their agenda. I think about South Africa, where there is still enormous unmet need, but the government has made progress because they made it a national commitment.

Even here in the United States not everyone has access to safe drinking water. There are poor counties in the central valley of California that don’t have safe drinking water. We know that these communities don’t have safe drinking water, but the money to either clean up the groundwater or to tie those communities to a neighboring water system that has safe water hasn’t been made available. Again, it is not a technological problem, it is not an economic problem—it is a problem of commitment. This is the United States. This isn’t Zimbabwe.

What worked in South Africa, won’t necessarily work in another place. This is another reason it is a problem. Political models differ from place to place. What works in one region may not work in another. There isn’t a single-solution-fits-all answer.

What is your level of optimism that we’ll achieve a solution?

With respect to water; if there is any reason for optimism, it is in the fact that it is not a technological problem. We do have solutions. There are success stories out there. We are making progress. But we have to get away from the idea that there is a single solution, and we have to get away from the idea that what worked in the 20th century is going to work everywhere in the 21st century.

The fact that we failed to solve these problems is sad and inexcusable, but it doesn’t mean the problems can’t be solved. We just have to be smarter and be more committed to solving them.

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Another Jobs Push

Almost two years ago, I reported on President Obama’s jobs plan, which he outlined in a speech at the Brookings Institution. Time has passed, and yet my report on how to get more Americans back to work couldn’t be more relevant today. Here’s the story that appeared on Dec. 11, 2009, in U.S. News & World Report:

The Next Jobs Push
Obama unveils a three-part plan for stimulating more jobs—to mixed reviews
By Lisa Palmer

A year ago, Americans were losing their jobs at a rate of 700,000 per month. Now, even as that rate has dropped to 135,000 per month, the ranks of unemployed workers still top 11 million. So it’s no surprise that figuring out how to get America back to work has taken the spotlight.

President Obama this week announced in a speech at the Brookings Institution a new “effort to accelerate job growth [in] those areas that will generate the great- est number of jobs while generating the greatest value for our economy.” His plan outlines three main policies to spur job growth. Small businesses would receive a tax credit if they hired new workers, and they would get relief from capital-gains taxes on small-business investments. Second, the plan includes money for key infrastructure improvements, such as building roads and construction projects. Third, it proposes a “cash for caulkers” rebate program that would provide financial incentives for homeowners to make their houses more energy efficient. In addition, Obama called for an extension of unemployment insurance and more aid to state and local governments facing budget crunches.

The plan has drawn mixed reviews from economic policy experts. Labor market economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says Washington insiders are starting to realize the enormity of the job crisis. “There is a strong consensus amongst economists that the February stimulus act is working,” she says. “But it wasn’t big enough to get us back on track. We need more.”

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University’s Urban Institute, is pleased with some components of the plan. “It was very important to extend money to states and localities to prevent additional job loss,” he says. But other parts of the plan are a mishmash: “It is not as well targeted to job creation as I would have liked,” Holzer says.

Both Holzer and Shierholz advocate direct job creation initiatives, which were absent from Obama’s proposal. Holzer said a $30 billion job creation plan to set up a public service employment program would put 1 million Americans back to work.

Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Business, is critical of both the original stimulus plan and the new proposal. “What businesses need are customers,” he says, arguing that a greater proportion of the plan’s funds should be directed to things like construction, which would stimulate consumption, which would in turn create jobs.

Obama did not talk about the plan’s price tag. Some lawmakers estimate it would total roughly $200 billion, the amount the Treasury Department estimates has been trimmed from the projected cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that could face resistance. Republicans, already howling that the $787 billion in the original stimulus plan was wasted, argue that any money saved should be used for deficit reduction.