Newest & Recent Posts

In the midst of the full-frontal politics that now passes for the nominating conventions of the two major political parties in the United States comes a modest opportunity for sober reflection by the candidates on some crucial but oft-neglected issues – policies dealing with science and technology. The opportunity comes courtesy of a group called ScienceDebate, which in 2008 and now in 2012 succeeded in eliciting from the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates their responses to a set of questions broadly constructed around science and technology policy. CSPO co-director David Guston gives his thoughts on the answers of the two candidates.

After the fourth murder of an Iranian physicist, G. Pascal Zachary looks into the history of government scientists during times of tension.

Elisabeth Rosenthal’s latest article in The New York Times Sunday Review is the latest rehash of one of the oldest debates surrounding energy—the ongoing flap over where to site the technologies needed to transport energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed. What is particularly striking in this debate is how locked in this debate seems to have become around what Rosenthal calls “a reality that Americans seem determined to forget: Large-scale energy is typically produced in remote places and inevitably needs to be transported to the populated areas where it is used.”

In this Soapbox post, CSPO Associate Director Clark Miller discusses the Department of Energy's little secret... that it is not and has never been the nation’s lead agency on energy policy.