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From this morning's New York Times:

[W]ithin weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama's chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty -- to be signed in Copenhagen in December -- "in a robust way."

And a little over a month ago we learned that the Obama administration would "ove swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards" (New York Times).

A climate change couch potato Obama is not.

Here's an amazing image from the inauguration of President Barack Obama. It's made up of 220 separate images. The resulting image is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels, or about 1.5 gigapixels. The software on gigapan.org allows you to zoom in on any part of the image. The image of President Obama to the left is a snapshot of a very small part of the whole image.

The site is getting a lot of hits, thanks to a link from Andrew Sullivan, which is how I found it. So don't be surprised if the response is a little slow or if the link takes a long time to load.

Clipped from the front page of WhiteHouse.gov a few minutes ago

Two items make the front page of President Obama's agenda: (1) the economy and (2) energy and the environment. To read a little more about President Obama's agenda for energy and the environment, click through or go directly to the Energy & Environment page at WhiteHouse.gov

This is what my carbon footprint would look like with

1. An economy flight from Hartford to National,
2. Public transportation from National to my hotel,
3. Two nights for two people in a DC hotel, and
   
4. Attending the inauguration.

0.278 metric tonnes. Think about that. If I'm normal¹ and if 2 million people really show up from out of town, that's about 550,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ associated with the Obama inauguration. To put that in perspective, the entire country of Bermuda was responsible for about 550,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions in 2007 (Wikipedia).

It's a cliche to say it, but next Tuesday's presidential election really is one of the most important elections we'll ever have. If you haven't already registered to vote, it may be too late.¹ If you have registered, and you're not sure where your polling place is², Google has come to the rescue. Just click on the link below, enter the address where you are registered, and Google Maps will pop up with your polling place highlighted.

Where do I vote?

The news staff of Science boiled down the differences between McCain and Obama to brief snippets on three dozen science related issues. Click on the image above to downlod a copy of the PDF from Science's website.

A couple of weeks ago the Natural Resources Defense Council delivered 100,000 comments on proposed revisions to regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act. The revisions would limit the need for federal agencies to consult with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service when those agencies decide that their actions would not affect listed species.¹

Originally, the comment period was to last only thirty days. Thanks to comments by the American Institute of Biological Sciences and others, the comment period was extended to sixty days. But Kempthorne is clearly committed to ramming these changes through before the Bush administration is replaced in less than three months.

Rushing to ease endangered species rules before President Bush leaves office, Interior Department officials are attempting to review 200,000 comments from the public in just 32 hours, according to an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press. The Fish and Wildlife Service has called a team of 15 people to Washington this week to pore through letters and online comments about a proposal to exclude greenhouse gases and the advice of federal biologists from decisions about whether dams, power plants and other federal projects could harm species. That would be the biggest change in endangered species rules since 1986. In an e-mail last week to Fish and Wildlife managers across the country, Bryan Arroyo, the head of the agency's endangered species program, said the team would work eight hours a day through Friday to sort through the comments. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's office, according to the e-mail, will be responsible for analyzing and responding to them. The public comment period ended last week, which initiated the review. (news services via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

200,000 comments in 32 hours. That's 6250 comments per hour. With a team of 15 people involved that's one comment every 8.5 seconds per person (not counting bathroom breaks or sanity breaks). Do you think Secretary Kempthorne plans to take the comments seriously?

The people a president picks as advisers and how (s)he picks them says as much about the type of president (s)he will be as any policy statement, maybe more. We can't predict the specific policy challenges the next president will face, but we know that those where scientific knowledge is directly relevant involve making difficult choices on how to respond to climate change, whether and how to fund embryonic stem cell research, what level of federal funding is required to ensure continued U.S. leadership in science and technology, how to enforce the Endangered Species Act, and a host of others.¹

In that context, it's useful to know how McCain and Obama have selected advisers on science. Here's how Jeffrey Mervise describes it in today's Science:

It's no surprise that the politically active Varmus, the 1989 medicine Nobelist and former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is familiar with Obama's statements on funding basic research: He helped write many of them as chair of a 40-plus-member committee of prominent researchers and educators who are advising the freshman senator from Illinois on science. The panel prepared the candidate's 6000-word response last month to 14 questions posed by a coalition of scientific organizations called Science Debate 2008 (ScienceDebate2008.org). Varmus won't say how much the answers were altered by campaign officials but allows that "we're very pleased with it. His commitment to science is absolutely apparent."

Last week, Obama's Republican opponent, Senator John McCain (AZ), provided equally lengthy answers to the same set of questions. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who serves as the candidate's point man on many domestic policy issues, including science, health, energy, and the environment, says McCain has contacted experts on issues such as climate, space, and "science in general" but has "no formal structure" for soliciting advice. An economist and former head of the Congressional Budget Office under President George W. Bush, Holtz-Eakin says McCain relies instead on the knowledge acquired during his 26 years in Congress, including 6 years as chair of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

The way the answers were prepared reflects the different management styles of the two campaigns. "Obama has thousands of advisers, and McCain has two guys and a dog," cracks one academic lobbyist who requested anonymity because his organization tries to maintain ties with both camps.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama answered the fourteen questions posed to them by Innovation 2008. In today's issue of Nature, Obama answers eighteen similar questions posed by the editors. McCain was also invited to reply. He declined. The editors interleave information on McCain's positions gleaned from other sources. Alexandra Witze also contributes an analytical overview that attempts to project where each of the candidates would lead the U.S. if elected.

In related news, Matt Nisbet argues that having candidates participate in a science debate is a bad idea. His arguments mirror those David Goldston and the editors of Nature made last winter. I'm coming around to their point of view. As Matt points out,

[I]t's unlikely that the candidates would actually discuss science, instead their remarks would be carefully framed to evoke ideology or emotion, and to make small differences on policy into openings for attack politics.

Rather than a debate on science, per se, we need to find a way to ensure that public policy is informed by the best science available. For that it doesn't matter whether or not the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy holds the title of Assistant to the President for Science and Technology policy. What matters is whether we have a president (and a Congress) who will listen to advice from OSTP and other scientists inside and outside government.

And that's not a scientific challenge. It's a challenge to all evidence-based approaches to making public policy. Advice from OSTP on science and technology will be based on empirical evidence.¹ If president and Congress won't pay attention to that advice, they aren't likely to pay attention to evidence relevant to any policy choice. Under those circumstances, any resemblance between good policies and those that are adopted will be purely coincidental.