SOURCE: AP/Osama Faisal

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, speaks at the opening session of the U.N. climate change conference in Doha, Qatar, Monday, November 26, 2012.

The next high-level gathering of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change started this week in Doha, Qatar, and will continue until December 7. In this column we provide an overview of the upcoming talks and discuss what the results of U.S. elections may mean for the Obama administration’s positions during these negotiations.

What to watch for in Doha

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Doha will continue the progress made to date toward advancing a series of tracks toward a comprehensive international climate agreement. While none of these tracks alone is sufficient to address global climate change, taken together they have gotten us closer than ever to a comprehensive international solution. The biggest items on the three primary tracks of the Doha agenda are:

• The closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action
• Agreement on a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol
• Advancement of a work plan for the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action

Closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action

During the 2011 climate talks in Durban, South Africa, parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed that the Long-term Cooperative Action should conclude in Doha. The action, which began in 2007 in order to implement the Bali Action Plan agreed to under the Bush administration, gave rise to the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun Agreements.

Though many throughout the world hoping for a binding international treaty viewed Copenhagen as a disappointment, it was never likely that the 2009 U.N. climate change conference could have ended in a binding agreement. The United States would not have signed onto an agreement that did not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gases, leaving out major emitters such as India and China—now the largest emitter in the world, the country’s per-capita emissions are on par with the European Union’s emissions. China even objected in Copenhagen to developed countries articulating their own 2050 emission-reduction targets in a formal agreement, presumably because it would mean that rapidly developing countries would be responsible for the remainder of required emissions reductions to achieve some level of climate safety.

But for all its criticisms, Copenhagen was groundbreaking. For the first time countries at all stages of development agreed to put forward pledges for national actions to address global warming by 2020. Over the past three years, 141 countries, including all the major emitters in the developed and developing world—which are responsible for more than 80 percent of global emissions—have made voluntary mitigation pledges. This was an important step forward, given that until then the only articulated pledges for reductions were made by developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol, which now account for less than 15 percent of global emissions.

Perhaps most importantly, the Long-term Cooperative Action allowed a pathway for a bottom-up approach, bringing pledges from both developed and developing countries to the table. The bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down architecture, allows for varying commitments by country. This is significant because it recognizes the different capacities and levels of development of each country. The question is: How do we ensure that the sum of parties’ commitments will keep us on a pathway where it is still possible to hold temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by the end of the century? This is now the agreed-upon goal of the U.N. process.

Many analyses warn that there is a gap between the total emissions reductions from parties’ pledges under the Copenhagen Accord and where we need to be to meet the 2 degrees Celsius goal by 2020. The current framework allows for parties to start where they are now and assess progress to see what must be done to meet that goal. The pledges—along with agreements on transparency, technology, forestry, and finance—were enshrined in Cancun during the 2010 U.N. climate conference. Parties agreed to report on progress of their unilateral commitments, and the following year in Durban, countries agreed to regular regional reviews beginning in 2013. Work on how to overcome this gap will now move to the new track under the Durban Platform.

A more important aspect of the Long-term Cooperative Action track will be the successful transfer of work streams from the action to other tracks and implementation of institutions previously agreed to in Copenhagen and Cancun. Most important are the newly created Climate Technology Center and Network and the Green Climate Fund. Both fulfill the promise made in 2007 in Bali that developed countries should help developing countries to more quickly transition to a low-carbon economy by providing access to clean energy technology and finance.

The financial commitments made as part of the Long-term Cooperative Action track negotiations are perhaps the most critical at this point. In 2009 parties agreed to targets for climate finance of $30 billion in “fast-start finance” from 2010 to 2012, and the creation of a global fund that can help mobilize the bulk of a commitment to $100 billion annually in public and private funds by 2020. Developing countries attending the meetings in Doha will be most concerned that a funding gap does not develop between 2012 and 2020.

We have previously argued that a ramp up of funding toward this $100 billion goal is needed throughout this decade in order to leverage emissions reductions in developing countries, where we will see the largest rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and to increase the capacity for private investment that can benefit all parties. Because approximately one-fifth of the emission-reduction programs submitted by developing countries to the Cancun Agreements are contingent on financial and technical support, they will not happen without global support.

These issues and others in the track will not be easily resolved. Progress made in the Long-term Cooperative Action on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, known as REDD+ technology, and finance and ongoing work streams must continue elsewhere, whether it be the Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action or subsidiary bodies of the convention. The outcomes of the Kyoto Protocol and the Durban Platform depend in part on how smoothly the work of the Long-term Cooperative Action transitions or concludes.

Defining a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol discussions will focus on the conditions that developed and developing countries can agree to on the extension of the protocol for a second period that would end in 2020 at the latest. (The first period ends at the end of this year.) The Kyoto Protocol sets binding emissions targets for developed countries that sign onto it, but developing countries are not obliged to make reductions. The United States did not sign onto the protocol for this reason. The 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution said the U.S. Senate would not consider a climate treaty that divided the world between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries. So far, the only major developed parties to agree to a second commitment period are the European Union, Australia, and Switzerland.

There are a range of issues here: the exact length of the extension, what new commitments for reductions developed countries will agree to, what level of ratification each party will agree to, and whether the Clean Development Mechanism (see below) should be open to any developed countries that sign on to the Kyoto Protocol or only to those that articulate an official Quantified Emission Limitation and Reduction Objective by the end of the second commitment period.

The Clean Development Mechanism, designed under the protocol, is the world’s only carbon market available to developing countries. The mechanism allows carbon credits to be earned for projects that reduce greenhouse gases in developing countries. Successfully reforming the mechanism will help ensure that a significant stream of finance for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries continues. In this respect, it is likely the most valuable part of the Doha negotiations over the future of the Kyoto Protocol.

Some developed countries that were pushing back against developing countries on the acceptable levels of ratification, such as New Zealand, have already opted out of a second Kyoto Protocol. Canada, Russia, and Japan also announced intentions not to participate.

Advancing a work plan for the Durban Platform

The Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action is on the agenda during the second week of talks in Doha. Progress on the Durban Platform is contingent on the outcome of the Kyoto Protocol because many developing countries will likely not begin work in earnest on the former if there is not agreement on a second commitment period of the latter.

In the final outcome at Durban, the parties agreed that by 2015 they would create a “protocol, legal instrument, or agreed outcome with legal force … to come into effect and be implemented from 2020.” The platform also called on parties to increase ambition and propose measures to close the gap between the pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord and the reductions needed to limit global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. Parties agreed to a process that “shall raise the level of ambition” of mitigation efforts consistent with the next major report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released between 2013 and 2015.

As we have argued, the most significant achievement of the Durban Platform is to create a process that will culminate in an international agreement that applies to all parties, unlike the Kyoto Protocol. To cement this in place, both the United States and the European Union opposed explicit reference to the “common but differentiated responsibilities” and equity in the Durban agreement. Both of these ideas have been interpreted to mean a hard and fast distinction between the obligations of developed and developing countries to reduce emissions.

There are two work streams of the Durban Platform—one dealing with the framework for an agreement and another with closing the mitigation gap. Both of these will be compromised if there is backsliding on the applicability of the agreement to all parties, which is quite possible given efforts to reinsert divisions between developed and developing countries in the current negotiations and others around the world.

The “Like Minded Developing Countries Group,” for example, is an emerging negotiation block made up of about a dozen developing countries that recently met to reaffirm the notion of equity and common-but-differentiated responsibilities in the June 2012 Rio Declaration. They demand financial resources and technology transfer in exchange for national actions on climate change and assert “that the process as well as the outcome of the Durban Platform in both work-streams are under the Convention and must therefore be in full accordance with its principles and provisions, especially equity and common but differentiated responsibilities.”

Efforts to enshrine common but differentiated responsibilities are elsewhere in submissions to the Durban Platform such as China’s ambition submission, which includes the following:

Developed country Parties should take the lead in reducing their emissions by undertaking ambitious mitigation commitments and fulfill their obligations of providing financial resources and transferring technology to developing country Parties in accordance with the principles and provisions of the Convention, in particular the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. The key to increase the level of ambitions to reduce emissions lies with the developed country Parties’ political will and the recognition of their historical responsibility.

China’s submission on the work plan of the Durban Platform similarly stated:

The ADP process will be conducted under the Convention and in full accordance with all its principles and provisions, in particular the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and its outcome forms an integrated part of the Convention.

India’s submission reflected this view as well, while Argentina and Brazil’s submissions also make reference to common-but-differentiated responsibilities and equity as the basis for the Durban Platform.

The U.S. position has been to not oppose common-but-differentiated responsibilities as such, but instead to insist that they do not mean there are only two groups of countries in the world with radically different sets of responsibilities. Since the Obama administration understands well that it can never get a treaty that looks like the Kyoto Protocol past the U.S. Senate, whatever the notion of fairness enshrined in the new agreement turns out to be, it must be one that acknowledges some principle of graduation: that a country can sufficiently develop enough so that it can move from one category of obligation for mitigation to another.

This is not to say that the United States has ever claimed that all countries should have the same responsibilities for reducing emissions, but that obligations for reductions should exist across a broad range instead of falling into one of two rigid categories. What’s needed in Doha in the coming years, as negotiators work to develop the framework and details of a treaty by 2015, is a conversation about how to reflect equity that ensures that the major global emitters are taking sufficient actions to prevent dangerous increases in emissions.

Besides these key facets, on the minds of all of Doha’s attendees are the implications of the U.S. elections on global and U.S. climate action.

What the U.S. election means for U.S. climate action

As the delegates gather in Doha, questions abound concerning the intentions of the United States now that the election is over. The re-election of President Barack Obama and members of Congress who voted to defend the administration’s ability to act on global warming is an affirmation of an agenda prioritizing clean energy and climate change. Just as importantly, the American public’s belief in global warming has never been higher, having grown to 70 percent in September 2012. More than three-quarters of U.S. voters want elected officials to take steps to address global warming.

Between March 2012 and September 2012, there was also a significant increase in the number of Americans who strongly agree that climate change could directly impact them—13 points higher than it has been for the past four years. Forty-two percent of respondents now say that global warming will impact them a “great deal” or a “moderate amount.” This measure of concern has historically been the softest part of the American public’s views on climate change, with Americans’ belief that global warming will adversely impact plants, animals, future people, or people in developing countries more than double the concern that it would harm them.

These same polls show that this past summer’s extreme weather and drought were the strongest drivers of this change in the intensity of Americans’ concerns about climate change. If these polls were run again today, after Hurricane Sandy hit the Atlantic Coast, this concern would no doubt be even higher. Given that we can expect more extreme weather consistent with climate projections in the future—as evidenced, for example, in a recent World Bank report—the American public will certainly demand more climate action.

Unfortunately, given the results of this year’s congressional elections, President Obama will likely be operating under the same political constraints for national action under which he was operating in his first term. Nonetheless, the president is standing firm on our international commitments for emissions reductions. As he reiterated in an interview during the campaign:

We can meet the targets that I negotiated with other countries in Copenhagen to bring our carbon emissions down by about 17 percent [below 2005 levels by 2020], even as we are creating good jobs.

On Monday Deputy U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing announced to the delegates in Doha that U.S. emissions are already 8.8 percent below 1990 levels, emphasizing that we are projected to meet our 2020 goal.

While some of these reductions are attributable to the shift to generating more electricity from natural gas, the Obama administration’s policies are effectively reducing greenhouse gases. A report by the Center for Climate Strategies using data from the Energy Information Administration finds the United States is on a trajectory to achieve President Obama’s goal for carbon emission reductions by 2020. But the economic slowdown and transition from coal to natural gas, which are often thought to be primary drivers of the reduction, combine to account for only around 22 percent of reductions. Instead, policies at the federal, state, and local level constitute the majority of the emissions reductions, accounting for nearly 70 percent of them. Case in point: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collection of 10 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states that has already cut emissions by 23 percent since the program began in 2009. Twenty-one states have emissions targets, and 29 states, as well as the District of Columbia, have renewable energy standards in place.

Even assuming that Congress is not willing to move forward on progressive climate action, the Obama administration will continue to address global warming using executive authority and rulemaking under the Clean Air Act, including the development of rules for new power plants. We can also expect the administration to pursue progress on limiting greenhouse gas pollution through bilateral and multilateral partnerships to advance clean energy technology deployment, to expand sustainable energy access, and to aid developing countries that will be hit hardest by climate change as part of U.S. foreign aid diplomacy and national security goals.

In this respect, then, we expect no change in U.S. commitment to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change process and multilateral bottom-up efforts such as enhanced action through the G20 and the U.S.-led Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which brings together states, the private sector, and NGOs to address short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, hyrdofluorocarbons, and black carbon, which are all more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Looking outside the U.N. talks

Regardless of the results of the Doha talks, it is important to remember that the new treaty being created by 2015 won’t take an ounce of carbon or any other greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere until 2020. In the meantime, parties must continue unilateral actions on climate change in good faith and as domestic strategies for economic growth. And we must pursue progress in forums outside the U.N. talks.

A new World Bank report warns that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” The report follows on the heels of the International Energy Agency 2011 World Energy Outlook release, which states that, “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change,” and that, “We are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C.”

It is clear that focusing on the official U.N. climate negotiations alone is not enough to put us on a pathway to limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s why, as a complement to the U.N. climate change process, the Center for American Progress embraces a “multiple multilateralism” approach—a slate of multilateral agreements that can close the gap between anticipated unilateral mitigation commitments by parties until 2020 and reductions in greenhouse gases needed to put us on a pathway to climate safety by the end of the century.

A column released during the U.N. climate talks in Durban in December 2011 introduced our multiple multilateralism approach. An upcoming CAP report will expand on the approach and identify where emissions reductions can be realized in existing multilateral forums outside the U.N. climate change negotiations.

For instance, an agreement to phase down hydrofluorocarbons in the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer could reduce approximately 4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent through 2020. The Montreal Protocol, originally agreed upon in September 1987, is an international agreement that successfully reduced ozone-depleting substances. The primary replacements for these pollutants, however, are hydrofluorocarbons, which have a high global warming potential. Hydrofluorocarbons, which are primarily used as refrigerants, are hundreds or tens of thousands of times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, but they are shorter lived. Their levels are projected to double by 2020, in large part because they are being used as substitutes for ozone-depleting substances that are being phased-out under the Montreal Protocol.

For the past four years, the United States, Canada, Mexico have jointly, and Micronesia has separately, introduced proposals to phase down hydrofluorocarbons in the Montreal Protocol, but the proposals have been blocked by India, China, and Brazil. International support for a phase down is growing, however, as evidenced by the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro’s inclusion of a “gradual phase-down in the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons” in the outcome document, “The Future We Want.”

We must deliver on commitments such as the G20 fossil fuel subsidies phase-out, build on the success of initiatives such as the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, and expand conversations to and within multiple forums. While the Doha meeting will likely end with stepwise progress toward a new international agreement, it is even more important now to look outside this conference to other forums for overcoming the emissions ambition gap we now face.

Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center. Both work on international climate policy.

Endnotes

SOURCE: Patents defined/ BigStockPhoto.com

You can also read this article at Science Progress, CAP’s online science and technology policy journal, here.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos spoke yesterday at the Center for American Progress on software patents, outlining the need for patents in protecting innovation, defending the Patent and Trademark Office’s handling of these patent cases, and describing the next steps and opportunities for public engagement. (Read his full remarks, as prepared, here.)

Kappos began his talk by outlining the significant role that intellectual property plays in the economy at large—40 million jobs created and $5 trillion injected into the economy, accounting for a 35 percent chunk of U.S. GDP. While the significant impact of intellectual property on the economy is indisputable, opinions differ on how to best protect intellectual property and what drives—or hinders—innovation, particularly in the realm of software.

A central question Kappos raised was whether software should be treated differently from hardware. He answered that question with a resounding “no.” Referencing GPS technology and the da Vinci Surgical System, he described innovations where software was highly integrated with hardware and defended programmers who need to protect their algorithms and access venture capital to help support their projects.

For most of history, conventional wisdom has been that software is more of an idea than device, and consequently should be protected by copyright rather than patent law. But in his remarks yesterday, Kappos challenged that notion, stating, “patents are issued for process and apparatus, which are determined to be novel and non-obvious. Patents are not granted for abstract ideas.”

In the question-and-answer session, he noted that the Supreme Court has struggled with software patents and cited their 2010 decision in Bilski v. Kappos. In the case, the Court affirmed the Federal Circuit decision invalidating Bilski’s patent–a claimed invention that explains how commodities buyers and sellers in the energy market can protect, or hedge, against the risk of price changes. The Court rejected the Bilski patent for being an “abstract idea,” not patentable under Section 101 of the Patent Act, and suggested that other tests be conducted to determine patentability.

Kappos gave a detailed accounting of how the Patent and Trademark Office is working to issue only high-quality patents for software through strengthening the obviousness standard, using crowdsourcing to solicit third-party submissions of prior art at Ask Patents, and providing extensive training to patent examiners—more than 1,700 hours worth in fiscal year 2012. He cited seven metrics his office has developed to measure patent quality, which he terms the “lexus of quality standards,” as well as 101 Guidelines and 112 Guidelines–referring to sections of the patent code—to provide further clarity on which inventions are patent eligible.

The obviousness standard and prior art issues—two critical factors in the evaluation of a patent application—have both posed thorny issues in the software realm.

One prominent example surrounded the patentability of a software technique known as “backing store.” Backing store was a technique developed in the 1980s to save the content of a partially hidden window in an off-screen memory so as to be quickly restored when the window that blocked it is removed from view.

As described in Patent Wars by science journalist and author Fred Warshofsky, this technique was considered so obvious that it was incorporated into a program called the X Windows System developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but was not the subject of a publication on its own. In the programmer’s manual published by these scientists, there was mention of turning the backing store on and off.

Unfortunately, AT&T did believe it patentable and the MIT programming manual—published one week after AT&T’s patent application was filed—was not considered prior art. The issuance of this patent threatened not only to thwart MIT’s use of the technique they developed but also the ability of computer companies and users who accepted the software from MIT under the assumption that it was free.

While software patents have come a long way since the backing store patent was issued in 1985, critics raise the same concerns with more recent patents like Amazon’s one-click ordering. After a patent office reexamination, the patent was confirmed in March 2010. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and author of the GNU operating system, opposed the patent and wrote that the one-click technology is “an important and obvious idea for e-commerce.”

But aside from the difficulty in verifying nonobviousness and prior art in the software industry, other opponents of software patenting have long argued against such protection on philosophical grounds. In a 1994 public hearing on the “Use of the Patent System to Protect Software-Related Inventions,” Douglas Brotz, then the principal scientist at Adobe Corporation, stated that “software per se should not be allowed patent protection.” He continued:

I take this position as the creator of software and as the beneficiary of the rewards that innovative software can bring in the marketplace. … [Adobe and I] take this position because it is the best policy for maintaining a healthy software industry, where innovation can prosper. …

I argue that software should not be patented, not because it is difficult to do so, but because it is wrong to do so.

The software marketplace requires constant innovation regardless of whether the computer programs can be patented or not. Indeed, the fundamental computer programs and concepts on which the entire industry is based were conceived in an era when software was considered to be unpatentable.

For example, when we at Adobe founded a company on the concept of software to revolutionize the world of printing, we believed that there was no possibility of patenting our work. That belief didn’t stop us from creating that software, nor did it deter the savvy venture capitalists who helped us with the early investment. We have done very well despite our having no patents on our original work.

On the other hand, the emergence in recent years of patents on software has hurt Adobe and the industry. A “patent litigation tax” is one impediment to our financial health that our industry can ill-afford.

Resources that could have been used to further innovation have been diverted to the patent problem. Engineers and scientists such as myself who could have been creating new software instead are working on analyzing patents, applying for patents and preparing defenses.  Revenues are being sunk into legal costs instead of into research and development. It is clear to me that the Constitutional mandate to promote progress in the useful arts is not served by the issuance of patents on software.

While Kappos and others may argue that these patents provide an incentive for innovation, it is important to observe how open source software—software freely shared and modified by the community at large—has thrived.

In The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, published September 2012 by Oxford University Press, the authors note that open source software has led to roughly $60 billion in savings to consumers, according to the estimates of one consultant. The authors add:

After a quarter century of enormous growth, there’s no longer a serious question that the open source model works. Mozilla Firefox, the world’s second largest browser with over 150 million users, is open source. So is the Linux operating system, which is running on about 25 percent of all corporate servers. Over half of corporate servers run Apache, the open-source Web server software. And these are just a few of the many thousands of open-source projects.

Understandably, those who support open source software are concerned about the risks that software patents could present to the open source movement. In The Wealth of Networks, distinguished Harvard professor and author Yochai Benkler poses the problem:

From the perspective of the battle over the institutional ecology, free software and open-source development stand to lose the most from software patents. A patent holder may charge a firm that develops dependent software in order to capture rents. However, there is no obvious party to charge for free software development. … if working on a [particular design] problem requires a patent license, and if any new development must not only write new source code, but also avoid replicating a broad scope patent or else pay a large fee, then the conditions for free software development are thoroughly undermined.

Free software is responsible for some of the most basic and widely used innovations and utilities on the Internet today. Software more generally is heavily populated by service firms that do not functionally rely on exclusive rights, copyrights, or patents. Neither free software nor service-based software development need patents, and both, particularly free and open-source software, stand to be stifled significantly by widespread software patenting.

Both President Barack Obama and Kappos should be applauded for taking on the herculean task of reforming the patent system—a project neglected for the last 60 years. While China is expected to surpass the United States in the total number of patents held for the first time this year, it is still important for our process to be more discriminating, in order to allow innovation to thrive.

The Patent and Trademark Office will host a public roundtable on January 11, 2013, to take comments for setting up a system to improve the records on existing patents. Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based nonprofit working on patent issues, provides more information on the areas for reform here.

Christina DiPasquale is the Associate Director for Press Relations at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: Laboratory Assistant from Big Stock.

One year after graduation, female engineering majors earn 88 percent of what men earn on average, according to a new study.

You can also read this article at Science Progress, CAP’s online science and technology policy journal, here.

The pay gap between men and women is nothing new, but the science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, fields have long been touted as having a lower-than-average wage gap. A new study, however, has found that’s not always the case.

The report, published by the American Association of University Women, found that one year after graduation female college graduates earn about 82 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. It also found that women who major in key STEM fields aren’t exempt from this gap. Among computer and information technology majors, women earned 77 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries one year after graduation. Men with these majors earned on average $51,296, while women earned $39,618. Female engineering majors earned 88 percent of what men earned on average, with men earning $55,152 to women’s $48,493.

The study attributed some of this gap to the fact that after graduating women often take different jobs than men even when they majored in the same field:

Among engineering and engineering technology majors, 57 percent of men were working as engineers compared with 39 percent of women .… In contrast, 20 percent of women who graduated with an engineering or engineering technology degree were working in a white-collar occupation other than engineering, science, or business, compared with 4 percent of men.

These results, which focus on graduates’ majors instead of their fields of work, are consistent with a 2010 Department of Commerce report, which found women in STEM jobs experienced a 14 percent gap in wages, earning 86 cents for every dollar men in the same fields earned—a disparity which, though lower than the average 21 percent pay gap in non-STEM jobs, is still significant.

On top of not going into the same jobs as men after graduating with a STEM major—and experiencing a pay gap when they do—far fewer women choose a STEM major than men. The American Association of University Women study found that among 2007–08 graduates, only 18 percent of engineering and technology majors and 19 percent of computer and information-science majors were women. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, in 2009 there were 2.5 million college-educated working women with STEM degrees, compared with 6.7 million men.

The Department of Commerce speculates that the reasons for this gender gap could stem from outdated gender stereotypes, from a lack of female role models in STEM fields, and from the possibility that STEM careers are less accommodating to people “cycling in and out of the work-force to raise a family.”

An Association for Women in Science survey of workers in STEM fields adds proof to the last speculation, finding that lack of workplace flexibility, dissatisfaction with career development opportunities, and low salaries were key complaints among both men and women respondents, and that 40 percent of women respondents said they put off having a child because of their careers, compared to 27 percent of men respondents.

A 2012 Yale study adds another potential explanation for a gender and pay gap in STEM fields: a science faculty biased toward male students. In the study, science faculty participants rated a hypothetical applicant assigned a male name as “significantly more competent and hirable” than the identical applicant assigned a female name. These participants also were willing to pay the male $4,000 more than the female applicant and were more willing to provide mentoring to the male than the female applicant.

In a 2010 study, the American Association of University Women recommended that to address the skewed male to female ratio in STEM fields, universities should actively recruit high school girls to STEM majors and encourage girls’ interest in science early on in life. Some universities have begun doing just that—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sends female students to secondary schools to persuade girls to consider STEM fields at MIT, while the University of Central Arkansas is using a $10,000 grant to recruit first-year females to computer science and provide them with mentoring throughout their time at the university. Texas A&M uses on-campus workshops such as “Expanding Your Horizons” to encourage middle-school girls’ interest in science, and Kettering University in Michigan hosts a two-week engineering camp for 11th-grade girls.

The federal government has also gotten involved in closing the STEM gender gap. University of Cincinnati researchers are using a $3.7 million National Science Foundation grant to study how to recruit and keep women in STEM fields. President Barack Obama has called for increased involvement of women in the STEM fields, and in April 2011 the White House announced four new commitments to increase women’s and girls’ interest and involvement in STEM.

These initiatives are steps in the right direction toward getting girls and young women interested in pursuing STEM careers, but more could be done to make working conditions better for women once they do enter a career—whether in STEM or in other fields.

The United States is one of only three countries in the developed world that do not mandate paid maternity leave for new mothers. When taken, average maternity leave for mothers in the United States is 10.3 weeks, compared to the 39 weeks paid maternity leave entitled to women in the United Kingdom. Incorporating paid maternity and family leave and child care assistance into U.S. policy could reduce the number of women who quit or put their jobs on hold to start a family—especially in the STEM fields, where women are more likely than men to quit in order to raise a family.

The American Association of University Women study recommends that the U.S. government enact legislation that goes beyond the Lilly Ledbetter Act in ensuring equal pay for women. In particular, it urges congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which updates the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by making it easier for women who experience wage discrimination to report and resolve the issue, protecting those women who do, and providing resources for women to improve their wage negotiation abilities.

It seems the wage gap and employment gap for women in STEM have three main causes: Fewer women than men choose STEM majors in college; fewer of those women who do study a STEM major then decide to enter STEM careers after graduation; and those who do enter STEM fields earn lower wages. But the American Association of University Women study suggests it doesn’t have to be that way.

If women can be inspired to join STEM majors, be supported in pursuing STEM careers after graduation, and be empowered with the legal tools they need to ensure they are compensated equally for equal work, we can start to close the STEM pay gap. And, as an additional bonus, we will add to the workforce thousands more of the high-skilled, technically able workers that our nation needs to compete in the global innovation economy of the 21st century.

Katie Valentine is a graduate of the University of Georgia and an intern at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/ Elaine Thompson

The preponderance of evidence shows that in virtually all circumstances, the health benefits of fish outweigh the detriments.

It seems there’s a never-ending see-saw battle in scientific research about certain consumables. Red wine will decrease incidence of cardiovascular disease! No it won’t. Dark chocolate will lower your body mass index! Or not.

Seafood is no different. For every report that Omega 3 fatty acids are the fountain of youth, there’s another study warning seafood lovers about looming poison from excessive quantities of heavy metals, especially mercury. But are Omega 3s really that beneficial? And what to make of reports that selenium in fish can counterbalance the negative effects of mercury? And just what the hell is selenium, anyway? What’s the truth about fish?

Of course, there’s no black-and-white answer, but I’ll try to sort through a few of the bigger issues and provide a bit of guidance about what to look for at the fish counter to maximize the benefits and reduce your risk.

First of all, a disclaimer: I’m an ocean policy wonk, not a doctor, so take all this info with a grain of salt (figuratively, people, watch that blood pressure!) and ask your doctor if you have deeper questions—particularly if you’re pregnant.

Omega 3s

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic has to say about Omega 3’s. (I’m using the Mayo primarily because my mother-in-law treats it like an oracle. And if there’s one lesson from this column that has nothing to do with fish it’s that you should seize every chance you get to make nice with your mother-in-law.)

There is supportive evidence from multiple studies that suggests the intake of recommended amounts of [fatty acids] DHA and EPA in the form of dietary fish or fish oil supplements lowers triglycerides; reduces the risk of death, heart attack, dangerous abnormal heart rhythms, and strokes in people with known cardiovascular disease; slows the buildup of atherosclerotic plaques (“hardening of the arteries”), and lowers blood pressure slightly.

Omega 3s from fish are considered superior to Omega 3s from other sources such as eggs or flax seeds because they contain the fatty acids DHA and EPA (let’s go ahead and skip the multisyllabic mouthfuls that make up these guys’ actual names), which are the gold standards when it comes to proteins.

Or are they? Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal wrote about a study that found no evidence of benefits from use of Omega 3 supplements. Yet the article goes on to describe various ways in which this study was potentially skewed, and it notes that:

Thousands of studies since the 1970s have shown that people with high levels of omega-3s have lower triglycerides, lower blood pressure, lower LDL cholesterol, less inflammation and a lower risk of heart disease. Those with low levels of omega-3s are more likely to be depressed, to commit suicide and have memory loss and brain shrinkage as they age.

So let’s see, one study saying there’s no discernible positive impact, against thousands of studies over four decades showing Omega 3s can make your heart work better for longer and prevent your brain from shrinking. I know whose side I’m on. Score one big thumbs up for fish.

Mercury and selenium

One thing that’s crystal clear in all this haziness is that mercury is dangerous. I still remember dropping a mercury thermometer as a kid and being intrigued by the quicksilver beads that oozed out of the shards—until my mother, not a yeller, shrieked at me not to touch the stuff. Less understood is the role played by selenium, a beneficial mineral found in tiny amounts in the human body, in counteracting the negative effects of mercury.

Mercury accumulates in fish as a byproduct, primarily of burning fossil fuels. Mercury finds its way into the ocean from precipitation and settling of emissions from coal plants; it is then consumed by microscopic organisms that are in turn eaten by larger organisms and so on up the food chain. (For more on the relationship between coal and mercury, particularly the battle over an EPA regulation to control it, see the work of my colleagues Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman.)

The result of this so-called bioaccumulation is that larger, carnivorous fish tend to have higher concentrations of mercury in their flesh because they have spent their lives eating and processing lots of smaller fish, and while the nutritious elements of the prey are turned into energy, the mercury is stored rather than cleansed out of the larger fish’s system.

On the other side of the ledger, large ocean fish also tend to have higher concentrations of selenium, a trace mineral essential to human health that bonds to the mercury and prevents it from being absorbed in your brain. Which, simply put, is a good thing.

Many larger fish are widely cited as having the highest concentrations of mercury, particularly king mackerel, swordfish, shark, tilefish, and some tunas. After growing up on the coast, and working on fisheries issues for over a decade, I’ve never been served either a tilefish or a king mackerel, so those shouldn’t be tough to give up. And there are plenty of reasons beyond mercury not to eat shark—many species are overfished primarily as a result of the inflated value of their fins for shark fin soup, but also because sharks are very slow to reproduce.

Swordfish and most tunas, on the other hand, are a popular menu items and, at least in the United States, sustainably harvested. In addition, according to a study sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Energy and Environmental Research Center’s Center for Air Toxic Metals, and other government and nongovernment entities, these species also contain more selenium than mercury. This study concludes that other than for young children and pregnant mothers, “there are no recommendations to avoid any ocean fish,” including swordfish and tunas.

This finding was backed by a new study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, stating that most seafood’s benefits outweighed its detriments.

Conclusion

The preponderance of evidence shows that in virtually all circumstances, the health benefits of fish outweigh the detriments. Omega 3 fatty acids are widely thought to be a major health boon and while consumers should be cognizant of mercury in their fish, particularly when pregnant or feeding young children, for the majority of adults, even this environmental toxin shouldn’t scare you off your swordfish steak.

As always, the best ways to pick your seafood are to seek fresh, local (when possible), sustainably harvested products—remember, American fisheries are among the most sustainably managed in the world and the number one rule of sustainability is buy American—and when in doubt, follow the age-old rule of thumb, “All things in moderation. Even moderation.”

Particularly when it comes to red wine and chocolate.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Stew Milne

Fishing boats are shown docked at the pier in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

Science is integral to fishing operations. Without the ability to estimate how many fish exist in the ocean there’s no way to determine how many of them we can catch while allowing the remaining fish populations to stay viable. But fish live in a mostly invisible world beneath the ocean surface, they move around constantly, and they eat each other. This creates a dynamic population structure that’s incredibly difficult to track, making fish virtually impossible to count.

Thus, fisheries scientists—like political pollsters or other statisticians—must rely on imperfect data to make their predictions about the status and health of fish populations. They take these data—some of which they collect, some of which come from fishermen—and plug them into scientific models which, in turn, create estimates of population health. Because the entire population of a given species is frequently divided into subpopulations known as “stocks,” these estimates are called “stock assessments,” and they form the backbone of modern fishery management in the United States.

These assessments provide an estimate of the current state of a fish population and, in some cases, forecast future trends. This tells us whether fishery management goals are being met and indicates the type of conditions to which the fishery will have to adapt in the near future. In an ideal world, scientists would have the resources to provide managers with updated stock assessments for each species every year, but their expense and complexity mean they can only be updated periodically.

Regardless of how frequently they can be updated, strong, science-based stock assessments are the key to future sustainability, not just of the fish but also of the fishing industry. Fishing is an inherently unstable business, yet strong, accurate science can give fishermen a better understanding of whether their resource will remain healthy, and if it does, how many fish they will be allowed to catch. This in turn allows fishermen to make informed business decisions and stabilizes coastal economies.

But to commercial and recreational fishermen, who are on the water day in and day out, and whose livelihoods in some cases depend on their ability to catch fish or take people fishing, the stock assessment process can seem like a nebulous, convoluted exercise, the results of which often seem to them anything but scientific. Somewhat counter-intuitively, this perception can be reinforced by changes that sometimes occur in the stock assessments themselves.

In 2011, for example, a new stock assessment of one of New England’s key stocks, Gulf of Maine cod, showed it was in far worse shape than the previous assessment predicted. This kind of sudden fluctuation, while understandable from a scientist’s perspective as improvements are made in data collection and analysis, is infuriating to fishermen and can, as in the case with Gulf of Maine cod, endanger the entire industry.

In 2006 Congress amended the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs our nation’s fisheries. One component of this amendment was a requirement for managers to set annual catch limits in all fisheries beginning in 2011 (2010 for overfished fisheries or those experiencing overfishing at that time). These limits cap the amount of fish that can be caught each year, and must be set to ensure overfishing does not occur, or in the cases of overfished fisheries, to ensure that they are rebuilt to sustainable levels within 10 years. Stock assessments provide the foundations upon which fishery regulators, including the regional fishery management councils and ultimately the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, construct these catch limits.

This issue brief is intended to be a primer on stock assessments, asking and answering fundamental questions about the process. Until we develop technology that can take a snapshot of the entire ocean and count every fish, there will always be room for improvement in fisheries science. But the work being carried out today at NOAA’s fisheries science centers meets the threshold established in law—it is the “best available”—and as such, it must provide the foundation upon which our fishery management policy is constructed.

What is a stock assessment?

Fisheries stock assessments are stringent scientific tools used to judge the health of fish populations. They give managers, fishermen, and the public a sense of the effectiveness of management strategies that sustain fish populations, ecosystems, and the socioeconomic viability of commercial and recreational fisheries. Yet, because counting fish is an inexact science, they tend to produce results that include a varying degree of uncertainty. This often leads to disbelief or mistrust about fishery science and management—a situation that erodes regulators’ ability to manage fish resources for the greatest overall benefit.

Assessments estimate a fish population’s size (how many exist), biomass (the sum of their weight), productivity (how quickly and often they reproduce), and age structure (how many old ones compared to young ones). The most complex assessments can include even more in-depth information on things such as the average number of eggs produced, the number of males versus females, how fast they grow, the habits of newly hatched fish, juveniles and adults, their migratory patterns, what they eat, and the rate at which they die naturally (natural mortality) and from fishing (fishing mortality).

Because we can’t see and count all the fish, scientists collect data from multiple sources. These include data from fishermen’s harvests, general oceanographic data from ocean observing systems and other sources, and sampling activities in which scientists on board NOAA’s research vessels and other platforms go out and catch and count fish themselves.

They then feed these data into computer models to generate assessments of the population as a whole. Like tiles in a mosaic, each data point contributes additional clarity to the overall picture of a fish population’s health or lack thereof.

Yet data used to develop stock assessments are imprecise because they are difficult and expensive to collect. An assessment is necessarily complex due to the biological system in which fish live. Scientists, therefore, must design models that make careful use of assumptions to extrapolate what the samples say about the population as a whole.

Because of this complexity, scientists recently started to recognize that they need to know more than just about the species in question—they need to know how that species fits into the broader ecosystem. Ecosystem-based management requires consideration of where an organism lives, what type of habitat it prefers, what it eats, what eats it, and the potential impacts changes in the environment. This approach requires information from many disciplines, different levels of ecological organization, and across a much longer time scale and geographic distribution.

All these data mean assessment documents are incredibly dense. They can fill hundreds of pages with data, statistics, and formulae all tied together with one or more statistical models. And still they contain considerable uncertainty due to the impossibility of replicating the actual dynamics of a fish stock that occur in a large natural ecosystem, and because fisheries assessments require projections of future events such as how many new fish will be born and survive from year to year, and how environmental conditions will change as a result of climate, weather patterns, or other external factors.

How are stock assessments used?

Stock assessments measure whether fish populations are meeting targets established in fishery management plans and actions, and ultimately allow managers to decide how many fish fishermen can catch in a given season or year and how many fish must be left in the ocean. They provide the background data managers need to comply with their legal mandates—to prevent and end to overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks within 10 years in most cases.

In addition, assessments help predict how a population will change in the future. Therefore, assessments provide fishery managers an evaluation of the potential outcomes of different management options. These include:

• Limiting overall harvest, setting area restrictions
• Requiring minimum or maximum size limits
• Establishing daily catch limits
• Imposing gear restrictions
• Employing individual fishing quotas (also known as catch shares) which provide a fisherman or group of fishermen a set percentage of the catch

The inherent complexity of stock assessments, coupled with the reality that the results often don’t correlate with the conditions fishermen and others observe on the water, means the results are often criticized and politicized. Those who disagree with the results—be it fishermen who think the assessments are too pessimistic or environmentalists who believe they are too optimistic—will often challenge them, if not in a court of law then in the court of public opinion.

Ultimately, while scientists themselves will admit the results are not perfect, independent studies, including one conducted by the Department of Commerce’s Inspector General in 2009, show that in nearly all cases, the assessment process does constitute the legally required threshold—that managers use the “best available science” to manage our nation’s fisheries.

What methods are used to assess stocks?

No single assessment method will provide the best answer for all stocks, and for that reason, different types of assessment models have been developed. In most cases, as would be expected, more complex assessment models are used as more information is available about the stock. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration doesn’t have enough funding to do a full-scale assessment of each fish stock every year, so limited financial resources must be allocated for the best overall result.

NOAA chooses assessment models based on what data is available for a given fishery; a complex age-structured computer model can’t be used if there isn’t much data to input. In these cases, use of statistics about how catch has changed over time alongside biological knowledge about the species have to suffice, and as a result, the assessment is likely to have a higher degree of uncertainty, and may not be able to predict future stock size and trends.

How much do stock assessments cost?

Collecting additional data that can allow for the use of more complex models that may provide a clearer picture of stock status increases the overall cost. Even after the data are gathered, the cost of conducting an assessment varies widely based on factors such as the number of people involved and the number of steps included in an assessment.

Fishery-management agencies allocate significant funding and staff resources to collect biological data used for stock assessments. Collecting data dockside or onboard a ship, processing biological samples, and attempting to answer other biological questions are significant, ongoing, and often invisible activities that require a great deal of staff time and funding.

Relatively simple assessments that primarily examine and summarize trends (stable, increasing, decreasing) and other affiliated corroborative information can cost as little as $30,000 to $50,000 including staff time, meetings travel, and independent review. Other assessments are more complex either because the fishery includes multiple species or stocks, each of which requires its own assessment, available data allows the use of more complicated models, or there have been past issues with the consistency or reliability of assessments. In such cases, the process may involve pre-assessment workshops on quality of data and appropriate assessment models, compiling available information, conducting the assessment, peer review, review by independent experts, and presentation of results.

Multispecies assessments in fisheries such as snapper and grouper fisheries in southern regions; or groundfish fisheries in Alaska, the Pacific, or New England which include multiple bottom-dwelling fish such as cod, haddock, flounders, and halibut, can encompass more than 20 species. These assessments therefore include dozens of scientists and technical experts, and due to their high-profile nature, draw much public interest and scrutiny. With staff time, meeting, travel, and independent review, a more complex stock assessment can cost $250,000 to $300,000.

In total the assessments become a significant funding and staffing commitment. When data collection and storage, ship-based surveys, and other work needed for stock assessments are added to the formal assessment review costs, the financial cost and personnel commitments by agencies are very significant.

Who conducts and reviews stock assessments?

Each regional management council has a Science and Statistical Committee responsible for the science that informs council management plans and actions. The councils are composed of leading scientists in biology, statistics, economics, and social science who address a broad range of topics, including stock assessments, management action evaluations, social and economic analyses, habitat evaluations, and ecosystem management issues.

In coastal waters within three miles from shore, which fall under the jurisdiction of the states rather than the federal government, interstate fishery-management commissions (the Atlantic States, Gulf States, and Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commissions) coordinate assessments with state and federal scientists. Some states, including Alaska, Oregon, and Florida, also perform assessments for fisheries conducted in their own state waters.

Regardless of which management body is overseeing the work, fishery scientists who come from a variety of backgrounds and institutions conduct stock assessments. This group can include scientists from federal and state agencies, universities, nongovernment organizations, or those hired by industry representatives. The commonality is that each participant must possess the technical skill and objectivity to conduct a stock assessment.

Increased public and industry involvement in stock assessment sessions and regional review processes has been an evolving trend in fishery management. The public has been able to witness firsthand how a particular assessment is conducted, hear the tone of discussions during the assessment and review, and have a chance to ask questions as the work unfolds. The result—a valuable information exchange that helps the public to understand assessment results and gives scientists valuable information about the fishery in review.

When complete, an independent panel of experts reviews assessments, a process called peer review. Under the auspices of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, each region developed review processes that suit its particular needs. These processes all share elements common to any peer review process, most notably that the review panel is comprised of scientists from outside the region who didn’t participate in the assessment. Reviewers objectively examine the process, the data used, and the conclusions to ensure proper execution of the assessment.

Where do the data come from?

Stock assessments use data gathered by both scientists and fishermen, and from monitoring fishing activity. These data are referred to as “fishery-dependent data” and “fishery-independent data,” respectively. Fishery-dependent data are collected by fishermen, scientists, or fishery observers and monitors of fishermen’s catch or landings. It can include total catch and by catch, age and size data, discards, and anything else directly related to what fishermen catch. Fishery-independent data is collected, typically by scientists, directly from the population of fish.

Fishery-dependent data cannot be the sole source of information to feed stock assessment models because they can be affected by various external motivators such as regulations, market demand, and weather. Still, scientists and managers have learned that this information can be a major contributor to the process when it comes from trusted sources in the science and management process. Even so, like scientifically collected data, it must be verified before it can be used in assessments.

Fishery-independent surveys are designed to follow consistent and unbiased methods using the same gear year after year to provide consistent, apples-to-apples estimates of population changes called an “index of abundance.” They monitor trends in abundance of fish stocks over time and over the entire range of a species.

Surveys are often designed to catch young fish that fishermen can’t catch because their gear is designed to avoid them. Many fisheries, for example, have a minimum mesh size for nets so undersized fish will be able to swim through the gaps and escape. Sampling undersize fish allows scientists to estimate the size of a given year class (think of a year class like your high school class—it’s all the fish born in a given calendar year) before fishermen are allowed to catch them. Surveys also collect a lot of other information such as average size and age, reproductive maturity, and feeding habits, all of which improve the accuracy of stock assessments.

Fishermen have questioned why NOAA’s vessels often conduct their trawl surveys in areas where they know there aren’t any fish. In fact, scientific surveys are designed to sample to the broadest possible area of where one or more species may be located. If scientists only sample in fishing hotspots, they will inherently develop an unrealistic perception of the strength of the overall population. These surveys are designed to follow consistent and unbiased methods using the same gear year after year to provide an independent index of abundance, which can be used to monitor trends in abundance of fish stocks over time and over the entire range of a species. They are not simply trying to count the most fish they can possibly find.

Stock assessments require both fishery dependent and independent data as primary data sources, to adjust an assessment model, and to support assessment findings. Generally, the more data and information available about a species or stock, the more confidence scientists and others have in assessment findings—and more confidence means less uncertainty, which can allow scientists to change catch limits to more accurately reflect the stock status. When combined, fishery-dependent and fishery-independent data provide scientists with the best overall picture of the fishery.

What is “cooperative research” and how does it contribute to the stock assessment process?

Cooperative research is a way for scientists and fishermen to work together. It allows scientists working with fishermen to learn how to operate fishing gear most efficiently and where fish tend to congregate from the years of observation and experience gained by fishermen working on the water, and fishermen to learn about the intricacies of scientific research and why it must be done so precisely and methodically.

Throughout the past decade NOAA invested more than $200 million in cooperative research programs nationwide, funding more than 250 such projects in the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank region alone, and partnering with more than a thousand stakeholders. This research provided critical new information and, perhaps more importantly, improved relationships among scientists, managers, and the fishing industry.

Cooperative research programs improved and expanded survey information for use in stock assessments, developed innovative designs for fishing gear that can target particular species and reduce by catch, led to new fishing opportunities for fishermen, and helped sustain fishing operations at a time of increased regulatory challenges.

How are observer data used in assessments?

Observer programs send trained staff out on fishing vessels to record data about fishing operations. An observer will record the time and place of a fishing activity, and sample the catch that is brought on board the vessel. On board observers have the added benefit of being able to track everything fishermen catch, including discards—the catch that is thrown back over the side either for regulatory reasons (because it is too small or too young to keep) or for economic reasons (there’s no market for it).

Because discarded fish don’t necessarily survive after being released, scientists develop estimates of what percentage of discarded fish survive, and then discard information is included in stock assessments. Shoreside observers can only record the fish actually brought to shore. On-board or shoreside observers may also take biological samples such as otoliths (ear bones) that tell the age of each fish.

Adequate observer coverage is a huge boost to ensuring accuracy of assessments, but it’s also an expensive facet. In some fisheries, such as Alaska pollock, observer programs are industry funded, meaning the fishermen pay for coverage. Others use a mix of government and industry funding. In the Northeast groundfishery the federal government largely funded observer coverage with a planned shift to industry funding over a short number of years. Given that observers can cost more than $700 per day, this is a very significant issue for fishermen.

Another complication is that fishermen typically don’t like having observers on board. Fishing vessels are small and dangerous places—having another body on board can lead to cramped conditions and personality conflicts.

For these reasons, the percentage of trips observed is highly variable. The Northeast multispecies fishery has about 10 percent observer coverage while the Eastern Bering Sea pollock fishery has close to 80 percent coverage. In addition to on-board monitors, some fisheries also have dockside observers that monitor catches as they are brought to shore. Shoreside monitors can track some but not all the data their at-sea counterparts can gather.

Why do fishermen sometimes say there are more fish than assessments report?

Fishermen often report that they see and can catch plenty of fish when assessments report low population levels. This disconnect erodes support for assessments and makes managers and scientists seem out of touch with what people are seeing on the water. It also puts politicians in a quandary about whom to believe, fishermen or scientists.

Fishermen know where the fish are, even when overall abundance is down and fishing locations have changed. If they didn’t, they’d be looking for a new line of work. And when populations decrease, the remaining fish tend to congregate in the best available habitat, so in areas where the fish remain, they tend to be at least relatively plentiful. Fishermen know these hot spots, too, and concentrate activities at these locations. At the same time, there are an increasing amount of areas that have reduced fish abundance or areas that don’t have many fish at all.

Technological advancements contribute to this phenomenon. Fish finders, global positioning systems, and Internet access allow fishermen to get up to the minute information that allows them to target fish effectively. They’re now able to use technology to better target fish, even when resource abundance may be reduced.

Assessments encompass the entire historical range of the stock so they pick up the lows and highs of abundance that can occur over decades. This allows a population comparison timeframe that many fishermen don’t have. This is an example of the theory of “shifting baselines.” Fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term in 1995 to describe the gradual acceptance of the status quo as “normal.” Someone who has been fishing for 10 years may see an increase in fish abundance and think things must be better than they’ve ever been. But a fisherman with 40 years of experience may have a very different perspective.

On a shorter time scale, there is often a lag between when data are collected and when assessments can be conducted and peer reviewed. Most assessments use data that’s two to five years old, which can cause results to reflect past conditions rather than what fishermen see on the water the day the results are released. Of course, this time lag can cut both ways—it can either suggest fish populations are in better or worse shape than they actually are when the results come out.

And, in rare occasions, an assessment just doesn’t get it right. It may miss some trend in the fishery that significantly impairs the assessment results. A survey might not sample the right proportion of young fish in a population or may show an abundance of fish in a given year class that don’t survive to adulthood. This was a major factor in the much-publicized change in the stock assessment of Gulf of Maine cod, which was announced in 2011. Even though such errors are inevitable and endemic of the inherent complexity of fisheries science, when they occur in high-profile fisheries, they can cause a ripple effect, which makes all assessments seem suspect.

An odd twist to this discussion is that the current management system doesn’t lend itself to fishermen being completely open about what they see on the water. Rather, they often feel they’re punished for what they say about fishing conditions. If they say there are fewer fish than in years past, they fear the management community will say that cuts need to be deeper because “even the fishermen” think things are bad. Yet if they report that things are good, they risk being punished because “the fishermen are catching too much.” Thus, it’s understandable for some fishermen to suggest there are more fish available than assessments are showing.

Do updated assessments lead to “moving the goalposts” for fishermen?

The Magnuson-Stevens Act sets a requirement for fisheries determined to be overfished to be rebuilt within 10 years, with certain limited exceptions. Meeting this mandate requires scientists and managers to set a target biomass that, once achieved, will allow the fishery to be considered rebuilt.

Occasionally, new data collected as part of the stock assessment process can cause that biomass target to change. If the new target level is higher than the previous one, then achieving it will likely be harder and require more conservative management measures. This gives the appearance of changing the definition of success in a fishery in the middle of an established rebuilding plan. Some industry members refer to this phenomenon as “moving the goal posts,” because it appears the end zone is getting further away.

Biomass targets can change for a number of reasons. Scientists have an evolving understanding of what constitutes a rebuilt population because additional research can provide a clearer picture of what fish abundance looked like in the past. The change in the biomass target resulting from these recalculations is an important part of keeping the scientific understanding of a fish population up to date. The Pacific petrale sole fishery is one case in which the estimates of unfished biomass were increased significantly. This re-estimation caused the assessment’s biomass target to increase which, in turn, required reduced fishing mortality to reach mandatory stock rebuilding targets.

From a fishermen’s perspective this can be a frustrating experience because in their eyes, nothing changed. The historical abundance level has no bearing on what they see on the water today and is outside their realm of experience, yet reducing the amount of fish they can catch in a year directly affects their bottom line. Additionally, the pattern of increasing biomass targets over time can appear punitive since it can leave the impression that conservation gains are being punished by additional conservation sacrifices.

How do stock assessments account for environmental changes?

The Magnuson-Stevens Act doesn’t account for environmental conditions such as shifts in species abundance and distribution or oceanographic changes such as climate change or pollution. It simply focuses on preventing overfishing and rebuilding depleted fish populations without concern for how those populations became stressed. Fishery managers can only control one aspect of a fishery: fishing mortality. Other issues affect fish abundance but we don’t yet have a regulatory mechanism to account for this type of change.

There is also growing evidence and concern that some assessment results show reductions in fish productivity in the form of consistently poor reproduction or reduced growth rates. These losses reduce estimates of stock growth or rebuilding which, in turn, makes it harder for populations to meet their rebuilding targets even when fishing mortality rates are at what scientists would have considered acceptable levels. More explicit consideration of environmental changes in scientific sampling strategies and assessment model assumptions may result in stock assessments that more accurately account for the new reality facing of our marine ecosystems.

Why do new stock assessments sometimes change so dramatically?

There is no simple answer to the question of what makes stock assessments change. As detailed above, they are remarkably complex scientific models of what the best data available tells us about fish populations. Scientists continually learn from experience and observation, and gather a greater degree of understanding about how fish populations behave and what makes them thrive or decline.

As a result, when new assessments are carried out, the results may or may not change significantly from one to the next. Sometimes the change is the result of new data becoming available, sometimes due to a change in the model, or sometimes due to an actual change in stock size. These changes can lead to sudden increases or decreases in population estimates, which dramatically affect permitted fishing activity. Two recent examples of dramatic changes in highly watched fisheries are detailed here.

Red snapper

In 2010 the southeast fishery science center conducted a new assessment of South Atlantic red snapper. Despite a dramatic improvement in the quality of the assessment thanks to the addition of new data and an abundance of anecdotal information from fishermen that fishing was better than it had been in years, it did not show an improved population status. How did this happen?

The 2010 assessment followed one completed in February 2008, which indicated red snapper was overfished and overfishing was still occurring. The 2010 assessment benefitted from funding that allowed additional investment in intensive age sampling. This work found the red snapper biomass has benefited from two recent strong recruitment years since the 2008 assessment was completed. Yet the stock, while in slightly better shape than predicted in 2008, was still overfished.

Despite fishermen reporting the best fishing in many years, there are not enough older fish in the population. Red snapper can live to more than 50 years of age, but both the 2008 and 2010 assessments indicate that most red snapper are less than 10 years of age. Improving the number of older fish is critical because older fish produce far more eggs, creating a buffer effect against population declines. So even though there are more fish in the water, in order to rebuild this species, fishermen must ensure enough remain to grow old so the ones still in the water can mature and continue to accelerate the pace of rebuilding.

Gulf of Maine cod

Following a stock assessment completed in 2008, it appeared that one of New England’s signature fish stocks, Gulf of Maine cod, was well on its way to recovery. Then scientists released an updated assessment in 2011, which showed a dramatic reversal: The stock could not be rebuilt by the 2014 target date even if all fishing stopped. This bombshell rocked one of our most historic fisheries back on its heels and caused reverberations that are still echoing through New England’s coastal communities.

The change in stock status from 2008 to 2011 was the result of new data being added to the cod assessment. The optimism in 2008 was based in large part on a rosy perception of the 2005 year class. Two unusually large samples in the 2007 and 2008 spring surveys led scientists to an estimate that the year class included 23.9 million fish, a huge number. The additional recent observations of this year class in the surveys, and now in the catch, have not borne out this optimism. It turns out those surveys just returned a nonrepresentative sample of 2005 fish. This, in turn, caused significantly reduced population estimates in the 2011 assessment.

In addition, the most recent assessment found Gulf of Maine cod had lower weights at age, meaning fish are growing more slowly than in the past. Since biomass measures not just of the number of fish, but the weight of the entire fish population, a small change in weight at age can make a big difference.

This example demonstrates the uncertainty inherent in stock assessments and the challenges they bring to fishery managers and the fishing industry. These challenges are most daunting for fishermen who have to make business decisions such as whether or not to purchase a new permit or vessel, which can cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because of the variability of stock assessments, they must make these decisions based on uncertain information. This also makes it difficult for banks to make loans in support of these business decisions.

The changes made between the 2008 and 2011 assessments came as a result of significant improvements in fisheries science. But because they made an already dire outlook for the fishing industry even bleaker, they have drawn attacks from fishermen and politicians, calling the science into question and pushing for further improvements and faster turnaround times. Ironically, efforts to better account for the uncertainty in assessment data that led to the 2011 assessment’s findings were, in part, prompted by precisely this kind of political pressure.

Conclusion

Everybody wants accurate and timely assessments that will result in better management of our vast and valuable fishery resources, but the assessment process is neither static nor perfect. Stock assessment scientists are doing the best job they can with the data, models, and resources they have available to conduct the high number of assessments that must be completed.

The National Research Council has recommended several ways assessments could be improved, including:

• Investing in data collection that augments existing programs. This means continuing and expanding fish surveys, more aging of fish samples, and tagging. Overall, the best assessments have the most data, so more data improves assessments.
• Investing in developing better assessment models that make more effective use of existing data and models that better reflect conditions in the environment.
• Beginning new sampling programs to provide auxiliary data such as relative abundance of pre-recruits, egg and larval surveys, and direct estimates of fishing mortality. This is particularly important as we move toward multiple species and ecosystem based assessments.
• Training more stock assessment scientists. A significant bottleneck in conducting timely assessments for management is the limited pool of qualified stock assessment scientists. Increasing the number of people who can conduct and review assessments will increase the pace of assessments needed for managers.

We support these recommendations, and hope the rationale laid out in this report helped define the complexities and challenges of determining just how many fish there are in the sea.

Sound science is fundamental to ensuring a sustainable future for fisheries in America and around the world. Without an estimate of how many fish there are in the sea, there’s no way of knowing how many it’s reasonable for us to catch. And as world populations grow and bring increasing demand for seafood, we must maximize production from our fisheries—not just today, but for generations to come.

George Lapointe is an independent consultant on fisheries and ocean issues and the former Commissioner of Marine Resources for the State of Maine. Linda Mercer is the director of the Bureau of Resource Management for the Maine Department of Marine Resources; and Michael Conathan is Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

You can also read this article at Science Progress, CAP’s online science and technology journal, here.

That science, technology, and innovation are inseparable from prosperity is self-evident. Republicans agree. Democrats agree. Scientists agree. Economists agree.

So it goes without saying that our public investments in scientific exploration are always well worth the expense. And because it goes without saying, we don’t need to say much about it in an election year dominated by important matters such as vice presidential marathon times. It is as simple as that.

Or is it?

A bipartisan group of members of Congress led by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) gathered to reinforce this rosy perception at the first annual Golden Goose Awards on Capitol Hill last week. In the metaphor the goose, representing America’s public investments in fundamental science research, lays golden eggs, which represent unexpected innovations that led to game-changing societal and economic impact.

The three “golden eggs” honored included:

• Navy-funded physics research that led to the development of lasers (now used in too many useful ways to count), despite the opposition of university department heads convinced of its futility;
• Coral reef research that led to a new kind of bone graft material now improving the lives of hundreds of thousands;
• And jellyfish research that led to the identification of a fluorescent protein now widely used in HIV research and cancer treatment to track targeted strands of DNA.

At another recent Washington science event Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) also promoted science when he contrasted funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the producer of Sesame Street and a perennial target of Republican budget cuts) with funding for biomedical research: “If it comes a choice between Big Bird or cancer research, look, no matter how much you love big bird, big bird gets fried and sold for fundraising for NIH [National Institutes of Health].” Federal funding for public broadcasting is less than one-sixtieth that of the NIH, but the statement nonetheless underscores the apparent bipartisan agreement on the importance of funding science.

These publicity events underscore the bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that science is always a source of unexpected progress and thus worthy of our investment.

But beneath the seeming bipartisan harmony on display at events like these lie very significant divisions that are made all the more perilous by their relative obscurity from mainstream view.

Society has changed in many ways since the founding of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and the nature of the scientific enterprise itself has grown alongside it. We know that technology is responsible for more than half of the growth of our economy since then, but technology has become increasingly sophisticated over time. The path from basic discovery to useful new product has become lengthier, more expensive, and more uncertain.

It is no longer enough to simply invest in basic research and hope that the private sector can pick up where government grants leave off. We now know that in addition to supporting a robust basic research enterprise, we must also help bridge the many valleys of death that separate the increasingly numerous steps in the sequence from scientific discovery to successful new business. We need policies that bring into alignment industry’s often short-term, profit-driven incentives with the long-term perspective of federally funded research.

And that is where some of the divisions lie.

The National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, for example, is an Obama administration proposal to help align the incentives for research institutions, community colleges, government, nonprofits, and industry players to collaborate on advanced manufacturing. It’s a great example of the kind of bottom-up, network-oriented and collaboration-driven policy we need to encourage innovation. But funding for this proposal was sidelined by the House Republicans budget committee earlier this year.

Also disappointingly, House Republicans recently passed a misguided bill that would hamstring another successful program bridging important valleys of death in the energy innovation lifecycle: the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. Despite the high-profile failure of one partner that shall not be named, this program has been very successful in helping to reduce the cost of clean technologies, leverage billions of dollars in private capital investment, and create an estimated 60,000 private sector jobs for a very small upfront investment.

But applied research programs aside, there are even still divisions on the basic merits of curiosity-driven research itself. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) demonstrated this in 2011 with his political report, “Under the Microscope,” which spends 73 pages mocking cherry-picked studies that, in the expert scientific opinions of the senator and his staff, lack merit.

Then there is the budget sequester, which both parties agreed to and which could cleave nearly $4 billion in funding for research and development out of the budget, permanently depriving our country of potentially hundreds of thousands of new scientists and engineers who will have no career path without these funds. When major science projects are interrupted for lack of funding, and can be difficult to get them back. “Unfortunately, research does not lend itself to episodes of activity,” said Dr. Landon King, vice dean for research at Johns Hopkins University, in an interview with Washington DC’s public radio station, WAMU88.5. “It’s really a longitude experience, and it doesn’t work well to stop and start.”

The fact that both parties agreed to such deep cuts to research—at a time when these investments are overdue for a dramatic increase—should give us pause.

Perhaps it does not go without saying that both major political parties share a rosy, nuanced, and common understanding of the importance of public science and technology investments.

As the Golden Goose Awards highlighted last week, what benefits may come from any individual scientific study are often unknown at the outset; scientists themselves are often surprised by the economic potential of their niche curiosity. But we know that on the whole, and our shared investments in science have always led us toward a brighter future.

To quote Jim Cooper, “it’s time to get serious about science.” But getting serious about science means we can’t take Capitol Hill’s support for granted. To remain competitive in the 21st century, we need to ask our elected representatives to look not under the microscope, but beyond it—to the entrepreneur or innovative company looking to develop the next golden egg that leads to the industries and jobs of the future.

Sean Pool is managing editor of Science Progress and a science policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: Flickr/dan.holton

You can also read this article at Science Progress, CAP’s online science and technology journal, here.

Recently the Obama administration announced a new pilot program to create an institute for public-private collaboration and innovation in additive manufacturing in Youngstown, Ohio. The new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute will serve as a platform for collaboration for more than 40 U.S. manufacturing and technology companies, nine research universities, five community colleges, and 11 nonprofit organizations across the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia “Tech Belt.”

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is a new manufacturing technology of increasing relevance across many industries and across the globe. 3D printers work in a similar way to standard inkjet printers, except that they can use materials like plastics, carbon fiber, or titanium to print 3-dimensional objects instead of 2-dimensional documents. With prices for the technology decreasing rapidly and quality on the rise, additive manufacturing presents great opportunity  for innovation in industries as diverse as aerospace, consumer goods, and medicine.

Besides showcasing a commitment to an increasingly central and cutting-edge manufacturing technology, the announcement highlights the Obama administration’s tenacity in using existing executive authority to create jobs and spur innovation despite the procrastination of a do-nothing Congress. It is also the latest in a series of the key initiatives illustrating the administration’s successful and sophisticated approach to spurring a jobs and innovation renaissance in American manufacturing industries.

In a global economy where competitiveness and job creation are increasingly driven by science, technology, innovation, and information, collaboration is key. The traditional “linear approach” to national innovation—where scientific research on the one hand and industrial production on the other are conducted and managed separately—is increasingly insufficient to cope with the increasingly interconnected nature of science, technology, and industrial production. And as these lines continue to blur, smart public investments like the new additive manufacturing institute must be similarly flexible in order to engage with an increasingly diverse network of innovation stakeholders.

“We’re not interested in building your grandfather’s research institute,” said Rebecca Blank, acting secretary of commerce, one of five federal agencies involved in launching the institute, in remarks delivered on August 16.

The approaches that worked for us in the 20th century aren’t good enough anymore. Instead, we need to build a 21st century model that reflects a strategic, global approach to competitiveness and innovation. This model has to be based on close partnerships between the academic and business world, with support from government as well. This type of collaboration is absolutely essential to ensure that Made in America remains a strong slogan well into the future.

Connecting the dots: manufacturing, innovation, and jobs

Manufacturing accounts for about 12 percent of the U.S. economy, but is responsible for 70 percent of research and development, and employs a disproportionate number of science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, professionals.

There is broad promise for manufacturing in America, due in part to government actions to save the automobile manufacturing industry and also in part to the innovativeness of American companies and workers. The U.S. economy has added more than 530,000 manufacturing jobs since February 2010. We haven’t seen growth that strong for this long since 1989. In addition to jobs growth, wages too have increased.

But this is only the beginning of a recovery from a decade-long manufacturing slump that has cost the U.S. economy 28 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs since 2002, according to a study released by the National Science Board.

To keep the innovation-led manufacturing recovery roaring, we must continue to smooth the path for cutting-edge production-process technologies like additive manufacturing from lab research into widespread use. And to do this, we must do everything we can to build networks of innovation that connect research to practice.

As Gregory Tassey, an economist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, writes:

The issue of co‐location of R&D and manufacturing is especially important because it means the value-added from both R&D and manufacturing will accrue to the innovating economy, at least when the technology is in its formative stages.

In other words, innovators innovate better when they interact more closely with the producers of the technology, and manufacturers manufacture better when they interact with the research into innovative methods of production. In fact, beyond researchers and manufacturers, there are at least five kinds of public- and private-sector participants involved technology innovation, each of whose success is mutually bolstered by the activities of the others, they include:

• Researchers
• Manufacturers
• Financers
• Users, or consumers
• Policymakers and regulators

No one of these innovation participants can innovate without the others. Economically meaningful technology innovation can no more be accomplished by researchers working alone in labs than by investors working alone at their computers on Wall Street. These five types of stakeholders are mutually interdependent members of innovation “networks.”

“Everyone has a role to play in making these regionally-focused institutes succeed,” said Acting Secretary Blank:

• “Governments at the local, state and federal levels can provide funds to get the institutes started. And existing resources, such as Commerce’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership which has technical experts in every state working with small companies, can provide critical on-the-ground support.
• Local universities and community colleges can make commitments to train students and workers—equipping them with the specific skill sets they need.
• Local innovation incubators and venture capital providers can help bring in entrepreneurs, mentors, and startup know-how.
• And both small and large manufacturers can contribute not only funds but also equipment, materials, and labor to get the institutes off the ground—as dozens of them have in the project we are announcing today.”

Investments in the shared infrastructure—both physical and institutional—that brings key players in a region together to collaborate and innovate are critical to maintaining our competitive position in the global knowledge economy.

What the institute does

The $70 million public-private pilot institute announced last week is the first of what the Obama administration hopes will become a network of up to 15 centers for manufacturing innovation. Based on a recommendation from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the White House budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2012 contained a plan to invest $1 billion in mandatory spending to fund the creation of these manufacturing innovation nodes.

The centers in this National Network for Manufacturing Innovation would serve three purposes, according to White House documents:

• To bridge the valley of death, by connecting the people and processes of basic research with those of product development
• To increase collaboration and participation of all innovation stakeholders, particularly small manufacturers, by providing shared access to “cutting-edge capabilities and equipment”
• To provide a platform for workforce technical skills development in fast-growing and rapidly changing sectors such as additive manufacturing

SOURCE: AP/Rick Bowmer

Investing in our freight infrastructure system would not only help American businesses remain competitive but would also immediately produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the construction and manufacturing industries, which are among those hardest hit by the recession.

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Ports, freight railways, and inland waterways together comprise the backbone of the American economy. Employing over 4.1 million Americans, the U.S. freight transport and warehousing industries are relied upon every day to transport millions of tons of raw materials and finished merchandise to destinations across the nation and around the globe.

But despite its indispensability for sustaining economic growth and ensuring international competitiveness, America’s goods movement system has been allowed to fall into a dangerous state of disrepair. Decades of chronic underinvestment have left the system incapable of keeping up with routine maintenance, let alone sufficiently increasing capacity to accommodate forecasted growth.

The Obama administration understands the gravity of the situation. The president recently announced that seven improvement projects at five major ports would be expedited, with an additional 36 projects to be expedited by executive order in the near future as part of the administration’s “We Can’t Wait” initiative. The administration also announced the creation of a Task Force on Ports to facilitate better cross-agency coordination and help assess the relative importance of projects from a national perspective.

These developments represent significant steps in the right direction. But more must be done. Freight bottlenecks and other congestion cost businesses, consumers, and the public at large approximately $200 billion per year, according to a report by the Building America’s Future Educational Fund. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce places the annual cost of congestion as high as $1 trillion annually—roughly 7 percent of U.S. economic output. These costs result from higher transportation costs, more expensive everyday goods, and increased levels of pollution.

What’s more, delays and backlogs in goods transport systems that are designed to move large volumes of commodities—such as freight rail and waterways—also lead to ever-increasing shares of freight being moved by truck across the nation’s highway system. The more freight is diverted to trucks, the more congested America’s roadways become. In 2010 roadway congestion alone cost American highway commuters an estimated $101 billion in lost productivity and wasted gas—a sum that doesn’t include the cost of increased wear and tear on roadways or the societal cost incurred by higher emissions levels.

With total U.S. freight traffic anticipated to increase by over 50 percent by 2040, significant expansion, modernization, and system integration will be required. Investing in our freight infrastructure system would not only help American businesses remain competitive but would also immediately produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the construction and manufacturing industries, which are among those hardest hit by the recession. By investing in our ports, railroads, and waterways and implementing a number of commonsense legislative reforms, the United States can both help get our economy get back on track in the short term and ensure continued prosperity for decades to come.

This will require significant public-private cooperation. The nation’s freight rail system is mostly privately owned and operated, though the federal government invested about $560 million in freight rail in FY 2010, the last year for which complete data for all freight transportation modes are available. About half of the nation’s 25,000 miles of navigable inland waterways are federally maintained, with the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for infrastructure maintenance. In FY 2010, the federal government spent $882 million on inland waterways. Port ownership and management varies widely, but in many states, public port authorities own most port infrastructure and may lease it to private corporations such that both public and private entities contribute to capital investment and maintenance. The federal government spent $896 million on port infrastructure in FY 2010.

To bring our freight transportation system in line with modern standards, we recommend increasing annual public investment in freight rail, inland waterways, and ports by about $2.5 billion over current levels. We estimate that about $1.4 billion in new annual freight rail spending could be used to upgrade tracks, improve signal and control systems, eliminate street-level freight rail crossings, and retrofit tunnels and bridges. $150 million in additional annual investment in inland waterways should go toward repairing and replacing outdated locks and dams. And an additional $1 billion per year should be spent on maintaining and increasing channel depth and conducting water-side improvements in the nation’s ports.

But public expenditures alone will not address the pressing repair, maintenance, and capacity expansion needs of our goods movement system. More must be done to encourage private investment in freight infrastructure projects. Government expenditures should be particularly targeted toward projects the private sector cannot complete on its own and should always seek to draw in as much investment as possible from the industries and companies that benefit most from given infrastructure improvements. Only through collaboration and innovation can we successfully implement a comprehensive, national plan to repair, modernize, and expand our goods movement system.

In addition to increasing public expenditures and leveraging more private investment, we must seek to allocate money more efficiently and improve overall system planning and coordination. For decades, funding for ports and inland waterways has been distributed with an eye to politically driven geographic considerations rather than economic competitiveness or the relative urgency of repairs. Funds should instead be disbursed in a way that guarantees the highest possible return on investment. And while many of the nations that have recently surpassed the United States in infrastructure quality have comprehensive, national plans for modernizing and expanding their systems, infrastructure planning and spending in the United States is conducted in a siloed fashion that makes interagency or intermodal planning difficult, if not impossible.

In this report, we will first discuss in detail the unique challenges faced by our freight rail, inland waterways, and ports. We then will lay out how the federal government provides financial assistance to each mode of transport and illustrate how inefficiencies, redundancies, and underutilization of existing programs have undermined necessary investment. Finally, we will discuss in detail our general and sector-specific recommendations for boosting investment in our economically critical freight infrastructure.

One final note before turning to the topic at hand. This report does not address truck freight. Although trucks move the largest share of freight by tonnage and are a critical part of the supply chain, almost all of their infrastructure costs are already borne by taxpayers who pay for the maintenance and construction of roads and interstates. This infrastructure also overwhelmingly benefits many other kinds of road users and strategies for its improvement do not fall exclusively under the purview of improving freight movement. Consequently, we feel truck freight is better addressed in conjunction with policies addressing roads and highways, on which states and localities already spend tens of billions of dollars per year—$53.3 billion in 2008 alone.

Keith Miller is an intern with the Economic Policy team at the Center for American Progress and a student at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Kristina Costa is a Research Assistant and Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow with the Economic Policy team at the Center.

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SOURCE: AP/ Jacquelyn Martin

Burck Smith, CEO of StraighterLine, which offers low-cost college courses online and then partners with colleges and universities to accept its learners and give them credit for coursework toward a degree.

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Mozilla’s Open Badges Initiative and MITx—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s cutting-edge initiative offering free, high-quality college courses online—have put a public spotlight on alternative ways to deliver postsecondary education that not only document whether a student has achieved a level of competence but also validate the learning that’s occurred. These two innovative education models differ from traditional education by focusing strictly on the demonstration of competency regardless of how long it took a student to gain that competency. MITx, for its part, is introducing these new methods into the well-heeled community of world-class universities, while the Open Badges Initiative is at the frontier of documenting and validating learning that happens anywhere and at any time. Both initiatives point the way to a future where education can be high-quality and personalized yet so affordable that it’s accessible to millions of additional learners.

The question, of course, is whether these innovative learning initiatives and others like them can truly disrupt the current model of postsecondary education—a model that relies on time-based measures to structure and fund learning experiences.

The answer to that question lies in whether or not competency-based education can be effectively taken to scale. If the answer is “yes,” then the challenge becomes identifying what type of innovations in policy and practice are necessary to accomplish that outcome. One approach to the question—which is the focus of this brief—is through the lens of “disruptive innovation,” a business theory that considers how technology can change an organization, sector, or industry.

The first section of this brief provides a short primer on competency-based education in postsecondary education. Next we introduce the four elements of disruptive innovation theory and use these elements as a guide to study education initiatives that could promote disruptive innovation. Lastly, we outline a number of recommendations for policymakers on how to facilitate disruptive innovation to transform higher education.

Competency-based education primer

Competency-based education is an outcomes-based approach to education where the emphasis is on what comes out of postsecondary education—what graduates know and can do—rather than what goes into the curriculum. With a competency-based approach, you do not begin preparing a course syllabus by identifying content and readings. Instead, you begin by identifying competencies and then select the content, readings, and assignments to support student attainment of those competencies.

With a competency-based approach, students advance when they have demonstrated mastery of a competency, which is defined as “a combination of skills, abilities and knowledge needed to perform a task in a specific context.” Mastery is the sole determinant of progress, which means that delivery options multiply and expand since any instructional method or instructional provider that can move a student toward mastery is theoretically acceptable.

In competency-based education, assessment is embedded in every step of the learning process in order to provide students with guidance and support toward mastery. This heightened level of assessment is designed to build competencies in real time. The following figure, from the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative’s report “Defining and Assessing Learning,” provides a simple yet powerful visual of the competency-based approach:

As described in the report, the first rung at the bottom of the pyramid consists of traits and characteristics—these are the foundation of learning and depict the innate makeup of individuals upon which further experiences can be built. The second rung consists of skills, abilities, and knowledge developed through learning experiences broadly defined to include formal education, work, and participation in community affairs. The third rung, competencies, are the outcome of integrated learning experiences, in which skills, abilities, and knowledge are focused on the performance of a task. Finally, the top rung, demonstrations, results from the application of competencies. Assessment is deeply embedded at all stages of this learning process.

It is clear, given this description, that the design of the learning experience is dependent upon standardized and agreed-upon definitions for skills, abilities, and knowledge; competencies; and demonstrations. Once students, faculty, employers, and policymakers agree upon competencies that must be mastered, it opens up avenues for students to personalize their learning options by selecting among different providers. The ability to personalize learning options enables students to find the best instruction at the lowest cost. What’s more, as long as students can demonstrate mastery of a subject it no longer matters where they went to school. As it happens, standardized definitions of competencies are integral to whether or not competency-based education can be scaled up and “disrupt” postsecondary education.

A very short history of competency-based education

In recent postsecondary education history the emergence of competency-based education as a topic of interest paralleled the information-technology revolution, which has allowed for different ways of delivering education and capturing data about the learning experience. As referenced earlier, the U.S. Education Department in 2002 sponsored a study by the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative that examined this very topic by analyzing the practices of eight organizations, asserting that:

[A]ccess to learning opportunities is greater now than at any previous time. The learning paths created by advances in information technology no longer lead solely to postsecondary institutions. Organizations outside of postsecondary education have made significant inroads by providing performance-based learning opportunities built on competencies.

One of the institutions studied by the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative was Western Governors University, or WGU, a fully online college experience in which technology does the teaching and students advance based on their mastery of content as opposed to the amount of time spent in a course. It was one of the earliest models of competency-based education that has begun to be taken to scale.

Newer examples of competency-based education include the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative and upstart firms such as Sophia Learning, which is building a social learning, competency-based education platform. In addition, there are many other innovators across the country applying elements of a competency-based education.

It is possible that competency-based education could serve as a game changer in postsecondary education, delivering high-quality education experiences that lead to demonstrated learning and mastery at an affordable price. Over the past decade we’ve learned much about established organizations such as WGU but there remains a great deal to learn about the mix of technology, curriculum, and processes that could turn competency-based education into a true game changer in postsecondary education.

Let’s now turn to the theory of disruptive innovation as it relates to competency-based education.

Disruptive innovation as an analytical tool

In its most fundamental form, disruptive innovation theory, an analytical tool pioneered by Harvard University business professor Clayton Christensen, is a way of thinking about how technology can change an organization, sector, or industry.

Disruptive innovation theory makes a distinction between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation is when technology is applied in a way that makes it easier to deploy people and processes to better serve existing customers. In contrast, disruptive innovation is when technology is applied in way that creates a simpler, more affordable product for a new group of customers who, in most cases, were not buying (or succeeding in) the traditional offering.

For disruptive innovation to be possible, it must include four interrelated elements:

• Technology enabler: There must be a technology that transforms a business process that once required deep training, expertise, iteration, and intuition into a rules-based process that can be performed by computer software. Often the technology enabler makes it possible to “unbundle” a product or service that was once considered to be viable but was only delivered in a vertically integrated manner.
• Business model change:The new process or solution must be able to fit into a business that can be profitable while delivering customers a more affordable and convenient product or service.
• New value network:The solution and business must be able to connect with other businesses that offer complementary services and whose revenue models are also complementary.
• Standards:Since the technology enabler, business model, and value network create entirely new ways of doing business and organizing resources, disruptive innovation requires a rethinking of industry standards for quality, safety, and interoperability that define how the industry operates and typically support traditional products, services, and financing.

Whether or not a new offering can be disruptive depends on a mix of these elements being present. That being the case, let’s examine if these elements are indeed present for competency-based education.

Can competency-based education be a disruptive innovation?

Technology

Let’s begin with whether the necessary technology enablers for competency-based education exist. Specifically, this is a question of software that enables student-driven instruction, assessment, and student support. The answer to this question is “yes”—these tools do exist. Advances in cognitive science, software engineering, and human-computer interaction are all making it possible to use technology to create web-based education environments that both support the learning process at a granular level and assess student progress along the way. Often called “cognitive tutor” software, these online education environments are beginning to make it possible to validate student learning in new ways.

One of the more visible examples of the changes in measuring student learning in this way is the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative. Carnegie’s open learning courses are designed by teams composed of faculty, learning scientists, human-computer interaction experts, and software engineers in order to make the best use of multidisciplinary knowledge for designing effective learning environments. Carnegie’s open learning design team articulates an initial set of student-centered, measurable learning objectives and designs the instructional environment to support students in achieving them. These learning objectives become the “true north” of the competency that the student is trying to achieve.

Next the cognitive tutors take over and create a computerized learning environment whose interaction with students is like those of a human tutor—making comments when students err, answering questions about what to do next, and maintaining a low profile when students are performing well. Embedded assessments and tutors in open learning courses are designed to support students, but they also collect data on student performance that is fed back into the system. It is used to guide the student, the faculty member teaching the course, the team that will produce the next iteration of the course, and learning scientists who use the data to create and refine theories of human learning.

Western Governors University, which we mentioned earlier, is an accredited postsecondary education institution offering bachelor’s degrees in four areas using the technology-enabled environments that perform the instruction, assessment, and student support.

Additionally, there are other software solutions that are not necessarily as integrated, but supply pieces of the student support puzzle, including Course Signals developed at Purdue University and Course SHERPA, or Service-Oriented Higher Education Recommendation Personalization Assistant, developed at North Orange County Community College. Both student-support software tools were profiled in CAP’s brief on personalized higher education, “The ‘Personalization of Higher Education: Using Technology to Enhance the College Experience.”

Clearly, the technology exists to make competency-based education a disruptive innovation, though these technologies are not yet broadly adopted in the postsecondary sector.

Business model change

Postsecondary education leaders and policymakers are often uncomfortable using terms such as “business model” to refer to how institutions of higher education function. In postsecondary education, the term business model simply refers to how leaders organize people, curriculum, instruction, facilities, and technology to deliver education in a way that keeps the enterprise financially viable. In this light, the current business model is largely a campus-based model, one in which instruction is a highly variable process guided by individual faculty and movement through the education experience is time based. Using this model, students sit in classrooms for an allotted period of time (a semester or quarter)—which also happens to be how schools are compensated for delivering their service—with individual faculty creating highly variable learning experiences through curriculum and instruction.

We are now, however, beginning to see alternative business models emerging that are using centralized curriculum development along with technology enablers to standardize instruction and assessment so that costs can be dramatically reduced within the business model while still providing a meaningful education experience. Three examples of emergent approaches to the traditional higher education business model are Western Governors University, Straighterline, and Coursera/Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

As previously noted, Western Governors University has standardized curriculum through a competency-based approach to education and uses technology to create self-directed learning for students that are accompanied with assessments designed to demonstrate mastery. This model has allowed WGU to reduce personnel, curriculum development, and student-support costs while creating a new business model to deliver accredited education.

Straighterline, a for-profit, nonaccredited company, provides yet another example of how college-level learning can be delivered through a radically low-cost business model using technology. Straighterline, while not competency-based, offers low-cost college courses online and then partners with colleges and universities to accept its learners and give them credit for coursework toward a degree. Straighterline sources its coursework from open source content available on the Internet and also pursues validation of learning through other organizations that provide this service such as the American Council on Education.

Equally as innovative is Coursera, a venture-backed, social enterprise that has grown directly out of the Massive Open Online Courses phenomenon. MOOCs are college courses offered online by star faculty at premier universities that are open to anyone for free. Coursera is an attempt to create a business model from free and open content using its unique draw: After all, what student wouldn’t want to take a course from a star professor from a prestigious institution? Coursera is building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help, and awarding certificates of completion for which students pay a $100 fee. Coursera is starting with 40 courses online—from computing to the humanities—offered by professors from Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.

While not strictly competency-based, these are three different technology-driven business models that are providing attractive alternatives to the traditional, campus-based postsecondary experience.

Value network

The business models just described are certainly indicative of the emergence of a value network, but one that is not well established to promote competency-based education. Western Governors University and Straighterline are sourcing curriculum and technology from different providers to support their businesses. Coursera is building a business model around credentialing learning from free and available content. Together they form an emergent value network. The problem is the absence of a common set of agreed upon standards, both educational and technological, detailing how a new cohort of educational providers would integrate their offerings.

As a consequence, the value network remains underdeveloped. Two efforts underway, however, could help the value network coalesce—the Shared Learning Collaborative and the Learning Registry.

The Shared Learning Collaborative is an alliance of states, foundation, educators, content providers, developers, and vendors who are passionate about using technology to improve education. The Shared Learning Collaborative is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is coordinated by The Council of Chief State School Officers.

The Shared Learning Collaborative is building a set of shared services, aligned with the K-12 common core education standards, meant to connect disparate student data and learning content that currently exist in different formats and locations and don’t necessarily integrate with one another. The Shared Learning Collaborative technology will include the following:

• Middleware: Software that integrates and orchestrates activities across different state systems, components, and applications enabling them to interact
• Data store: A secure, cloud-based repository for structured and unstructured learning data
• Dashboards: Out-of-the-box dashboards to make student data more manageable and useful for educators in a customizable format
• Learning maps: Graphical representations of student learning data to help visualize student achievements and needs
• Application programming interface, or API: An open API to enable vendors and developers to create applications and content that can interface with the Shared Learning Collaborative technology

The Learning Registry is a new approach to capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of digital content to benefit educators and learners. Learning Registry is sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense with support from the White House and numerous federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, international organizations, and private companies.

The Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes. It is an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.

This effort, begun in 2010, is creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs. The Learning Registry will store more than traditional descriptive data (metadata)—it will also allow sharing of ratings, comments, downloads, standards alignment, and more.

Both the Shared Learning Collaborative and the Learning Registry are helping promote the development of new technology-driven learning products and services and how those services can be interoperable. Interoperability, in turn, is the key to the development of a new value network.

Standards environment

A competency-based education cannot exist without agreed upon standards for what a student needs to know and competencies that, when mastered, demonstrate that they have met the standard.

In postsecondary education there are initiatives attempting to develop these competencies. These initiatives tend to be partnerships between postsecondary education institutions and other stakeholders, especially philanthropic and industry-based groups. Let’s turn now to three such initiatives—the Degree Qualifications Profile, the Manufacturing Skills Certification System, and the American National Standards Institute’s Accreditation Program for Certificate Issuers.

Degree Qualifications Profile

The Degree Qualifications Profile initiative, supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education, is a framework for illustrating what students should be expected to know and be able to do once they earn their postsecondary degrees. The initiative proposes specific learning outcomes and competencies that benchmark the associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees along five dimensions:

• Applied learning: used by students to demonstrate what they can do with what they know
• Intellectual skills: used by students to think critically and analytically about what they learn
• Specialized knowledge: the knowledge students demonstrate about their individual fields of study
• Broad knowledge: transcends the typical boundaries of students’ first two years of higher education and encompasses all learning in broad areas through multiple degree levels
• Civic learning: enables students to respond to social, environmental, and economic challenges at local, national, and global levels

The Degree Qualifications Profile initiative is currently partnering with three states—Indiana, Minnesota, and Utah—to build out the framework in two disciplines each. The disciplines under consideration are biology, chemistry, education, history, physics, and graphic design.

Manufacturing Skills Certification System

An industry-driven initiative, the National Association of Manufacturers’ Manufacturing Skills Certification System has developed a structure of stackable credentials indicating that workers have attained competencies for increasingly sophisticated levels of work across many areas of manufacturing, from machine operator to engineer to management positions.

The essential elements of the Skills Certification System are:

• A collection of competencies that together defines a successful, high-performance manufacturing workforce
• Industry-driven certifications that align with competencies
• Best-in-class curriculum to articulate into for-credit education pathways that will ensure students achieve the competencies necessary to achieve industry credentials

This initiative is already beginning to bridge the worlds of workplace competencies and postsecondary education. In 2011 the National Association of Manufacturers announced a partnership with the University of Phoenix, in which the association’s competency-based curriculum and credentials will form the core of a bachelor’s in management at the online university.

ANSI Accreditation of Certificate Issuers

The American National Standards Institute, or ANSI, is the nonprofit member organization that sets U.S. national standards for consumer protection and product conformity. It works with more than 1,000 businesses, associations, and government agencies to set standards for product certifiers, personnel certifiers, laboratories, and inspection bodies. In 2009 ANSI started a program to certify organizations that provide education programs yielding one-year certificates to improve quality and rigor in this sector. Until now, this sector of the education world, which offers these certificates, has lacked any type of quality control. The criteria being used to ensure quality emphasize agreed upon learning outcomes and competencies and maintain that:

• Learning outcomes are based on industry input and have market value
• The content taught is aligned with measureable learning objectives
• Assessment tools measure learning outcomes
• Infrastructure assures the continual success of the certificate program
• A process ensures the continuous improvement of the training

In its initial rounds of certification, ANSI has accredited 30 organizations, mostly professional associations, as promoting quality certificate programs. This is a first step in developing quality standards and competencies in this sector and can help better connect it to postsecondary education.

Competency-based education can start to take off once initiatives such as this build out and scale the usage of these standards and competencies. Students, faculty, employers, and policymakers must all have the same definition of what success looks like.

Conclusion and recommendations

Our analysis clearly demonstrates that competency-based education does have the potential to be a disruptive innovation in postsecondary education. Our four-element analytical lens shows that the technologies, organizational experimentation, and standards are coalescing in ways that make competency-based education a potential game changer in the delivery and affordability of postsecondary education.

It is clear from our examples that postsecondary institutions, policymakers, employers, and philanthropies are trying to build the infrastructure necessary for competency-based education to take off.

We offer the following recommendations to further catalyze this process and urge federal policymakers to:

1.  Encourage experimentation in competency-based education that leverages the four elements of disruptive innovation. The impending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act provides an opportunity to modify the statute to encourage demonstration projects and experimental sites. We could use a clinical-trials model similar to the Food and Drug Administration, in which students would be informed that they were involved in an experimental educational offering and would thus get discounted tuition to participate.

2.  Survey state-level legislation and initiatives, in particular in K-12 online initiatives, to catalogue what policy and regulatory approaches to technology-enabled, competency-based learning may be applicable to postsecondary education.One area to look at would be how are the pilot states in the Shared Learning Collaborative aligning state purchasing requirements to allow for cooperative purchasing? And how is this process being used in postsecondary education, in particular with gateway college courses?A clearinghouse of this type of information could be made available through one of the initiatives named above.

3.  Hold a convening of business and postsecondary education leaders to discuss the value of competency-based education to all stakeholders to promote leadership and build consensus on how to move the work forward.

Competency-based education could be the key to providing quality, postsecondary education to millions of Americans at a lower cost. But this transition will require policymakers, institution leaders, and other stakeholders to manage innovation in the sector in ways that respect the strengths of traditional colleges and universities yet help build the business models and value networks necessary for scaled change.

Louis Soares is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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About the book

A provocative book that reads like an edge-of-your seat investigation into the intertwining worlds of science, technology, and government, Mind Wars is the first ever systematic overview of brain research and national security.

Jonathan Moreno unearths a multitude of questions about federal defense agencies’ interest in the burgeoning field of neuroscience and describes the many fascinating ethical and policy issues that may emerge from this relationship.

Moreno, one of the best-known bioethicists in the US, calls for the scientific community to be more engaged in dealing with the unintended consequences of their work. As new kinds of weapons are added to the arsenal already at the disposal of fallible human leaders and their war fighters, we need to be sure we understand how they are used.

Reviews

“Mind Wars updates [Moreno's] earlier accounts of the military’s wars on the mind to bring us chilling news of Darpa’s latest projects.  To these he is an excellent and authoritative guide.” -The Guardian

“Imagine a future conflict in which one side can scan from a distance the brains of soldiers on the other side and learn what they may be planning or whether they are confident or fearful. In a crisply written book, University of Virginia ethicist Moreno notes that military contractors have been researching this possibility, as well as the use of electrodes embedded in soldiers’ and pilots’ brains to enhance their fighting ability. Moreno (Is There an Ethicist in the House?) details the Pentagon’s interest in such matters, including studies of paranormal phenomena like ESP, going back several decades. Readers learn that techniques like hypersonic sound and targeted energetic pulses to disable soldiers are close to being used in the field, and even have everyday applications that make “targeted advertising” an understatement. Despite the book’s title, Moreno doesn’t limit his discussion to brain-related research; he explains the military’s investigation of how to enhance soldiers’ endurance and reaction time in combat as well as various nonlethal disabling technologies. The ethical implications are addressed throughout the book, but the author leaves substantive discussion to his praiseworthy last chapter. ” —Publisher’s Weekly

“Moreno asks the tough ethical and policy questions that arise from using knowledge about how the human brain functions. . . . Accessibly written. . . . Given the topic’s provocative nature, this is recommended for all science and bioethics collections.”—Library Journal

About the author

Jonathan D. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at American Progress, where he edits the magazine, Science Progress.

He is one of 13 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of medical ethics and health policy, of history and sociology of science, and of philosophy. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team.

Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences and is a national associate of the National Research Council. He has served as a senior staff member for three presidential advisory commissions, including the current bioethics commission under President Obama, and has given invited testimony for both houses of Congress.

Moreno has served as adviser to many nongovernmental organizations, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is a member of the Governing Board of the International Neuroethics Society, a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, a fellow of the Hastings Center and the New York Academy of Medicine, and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He advises various science, health, and national security agencies and serves as a member of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s TIGER committee on potentially disruptive novel technologies.

He was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow, holds an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University, and is a recipient of the Benjamin Rush Medal from the College of William and Mary Law School.

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About the book

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In 1994 Jonathan Moreno became a senior staff member of a special commission created by President Bill Clinton to investigate allegations of government-sponsored radiation research on unknowing citizens during the Cold War. The top secret documents he helped to declassify revealed a shocking truth—that human experimentation played an extensive role in this country’s attempts to build and protect against weapons of mass destruction.

In Undue Risk, Moreno presents the first comprehensive history of the use of human subjects in atomic, biological, and chemical warfare experiments from World War II to the 21st century. From the courtrooms of Nuremberg to the battlefields of the Gulf War, Undue Risk explores a variety of government policies and specific cases, including plutonium injections into unwitting hospital patients, U.S. government attempts to recruit Nazi medical scientists, the subjection of soldiers to atomic blast fallout, secret LSD and mescaline studies, and the feeding of irradiated oatmeal to children. It is also the first book to go behind the scenes and reveal the government’s struggle with the ethics of human experimentation and the evolution of agonizing policy choices on unfamiliar moral terrain.

As the threat of foreign and domestic terrorist attacks continues to grow, the need for our country to defend itself against insidious weapons is greater than ever. Can a democracy justify using humans in potentially risky experiments in order to answer scientific questions vital to national security? Exploring the possibilities, Undue Risk highlights a program of human experimentation that is a moral model for all others, civilian and military.

Reviews

“Between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. Army conducted over 200 “field tests” as part of its biological warfare research program, releasing infectious bacterial agents in cities across the U.S. without informing residents of the exposed areas, Moreno reveals in this chilling, meticulously documented casebook. A professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, Moreno (Arguing Euthanasia) served on a Clinton-appointed advisory committee that blew the lid off the government’s secret radiation experiments from WWII through the mid-1970s, which involved the injection of unwitting human volunteers with plutonium, uranium and other radioactive substances. His disturbing new book partly overlaps with Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files (Forecasts, Aug. 2), though Moreno’s survey extends further—from Walter Reed’s turn-of-the-century yellow fever research to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study; from army and air force mind control experiments (1950–1975) involving ingestion of LSD and incapacitating chemicals by thousands of subjects, often without their consent, to the compulsory vaccination of Gulf War GIs with botulism toxin vaccine not approved by the FDA that may have contributed to “Gulf war syndrome.” While Moreno duly excoriates the excesses and horrors, his overarching thesis is that human military experimentation is unavoidable, and he commends the army’s current infectious-agent research program at Fort Detrick, Md., as a model for future “ethical” research. Some readers may welcome his coolly detached chronicle as a complement to Welsome’s scathing, far more powerful expos.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“The infamous Nazi medical experiments on human subjects represent an extreme of government arrogance. But many other nations, including the U.S., have done similar if less egregious things, usually in the name of national security. Radiation, chemical agents and disease-causing agents are tested on people who have not given informed consent and may not even know they were test subjects. Moreno, professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics there, decided to pursue the subject after his service on the presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 to investigate allegations of government-sponsored radiation research on unknowing citizens during the cold war. He tells of secret medical experiments, some ancient but most during and since World War II, by many nations. ‘If there is a single lesson to be gleaned from the story of military-medical human experiments,’ he says, ‘it is that we can expect them to continue in the future…. I believe it is also true that these experiments can be done ethically.’” —Scientific American

About the author

Jonathan D. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at American Progress, where he edits the magazine, Science Progress.

He is one of 13 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of medical ethics and health policy, of history and sociology of science, and of philosophy. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team.

Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences and is a national associate of the National Research Council. He has served as a senior staff member for three presidential advisory commissions, including the current bioethics commission under President Obama, and has given invited testimony for both houses of Congress.

Moreno has served as adviser to many nongovernmental organizations, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is a member of the Governing Board of the International Neuroethics Society, a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, a fellow of the Hastings Center and the New York Academy of Medicine, and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He advises various science, health, and national security agencies and serves as a member of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s TIGER committee on potentially disruptive novel technologies.

He was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow, holds an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University, and is a recipient of the Benjamin Rush Medal from the College of William and Mary Law School.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), center, accompanied by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), right, and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), gestures during a news conference to discuss President Barack Obama's decision to halt the Keystone XL pipeline. 

Last year was a bonanza for the top five oil companies—BP plc, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil Corp., and Royal Dutch Shell Group—posting combined net-income earnings of $137 billion, a new record. Undeterred, Republican leaders in Congress are seeking to pass transportation legislation that will expand oil and natural gas drilling and will force the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project. House Republicans hope the Senate will concur and give these companies access for oil and gas production to some of our natural crown jewels.

Republicans in the House want to boost drilling offshore and on protected lands so that the federal revenues gained by this expansion of drilling can be used to pay for the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act—the House Republican five-year highway funding bill.

The Center for American Progress has a better idea: Tap the geyser of oil company earnings by imposing a tax on imported oil and ending antiquated federal subsidies for oil companies. Doing this will pay for an environmentally and fiscally sound plan to upgrade our crumbling transportation, water, and energy infrastructure.

CAP’s new report, “Meeting the Infrastructure Imperative,” recommends doing just that, among other things, to put more federal funds and state, local, and private money to work investing in infrastructure over the next 10 years. Our report details why $129 billion more per year is needed to meet our country’s infrastructure capital repair and improvement needs. CAP found that direct federal spending for infrastructure would need to rise by $48 billion a year, or about a 1.3 percent increase in total federal spending. Boosting federal spending by $48 billion would mean an increase approximately the same size as what was spent on the Iraq war in fiscal year 2011.

CAP projects that with this level of increased federal investment, as much as $60 billion in private infrastructure investment and $11 billion in new state and local investment could be mobilized as well. But where will the new federal money come from?

For decades federal gas tax revenues were dedicated to covering the cost of road, bridge, transit, and rail improvements. But Congress hasn’t raised the 18.4-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax in 19 years, and as a result, its value has eroded by one-third, leaving federal transportation programs chronically short of funds. If that tax had been indexed to inflation, it would be 28 cents per gallon today.

Instead of raising the gas tax now—or doing as House Republicans suggest and relying on mythical revenues from expanding oil drilling or scarring our nation’s heartland with a pipeline that could leak and pollute air and water—CAP calls for a tax of $9.50 per barrel on imported oil, alongside ending $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil companies, both of which will help pay for the additional federal infrastructure investments to meet our transportation, water, and clean energy infrastructure needs. By CAP’s calculations an oil-import tax and the termination of the oil and gas subsidies would generate approximately $40 billion annually. These funds are needed on top of the approximately $36 billion generated by the federal gasoline tax.

Recent Republican proposals also look to oil companies to shoulder some of the financial burden of infrastructure improvements, but they do so by relying on revenues from an environmentally devastating expansion of drilling offshore and on protected lands. CAP instead proposes to broaden the user-fee model of infrastructure funding to include oil companies’ tax contributions since they are significant beneficiaries of infrastructure improvements.

Under CAP’s plan tax revenues on imported oil and the revenues gained by ending antiquated subsidies would help pay for a decade of investment at the scale needed to bring our infrastructure back up to world-class standards. Specifically, our plan would enable us to:

• Build out our transit, regional, and passenger rail capacity and as a result make a real dent in air pollution: With better transit and new federal investment in better roads, drivers would face less congestion and save an average of $335 per year due to fewer car repairs and better fuel economy.
• Stimulate $40 billion a year in private investment in clean energy generation, distribution, transmission, and smart grid infrastructure: At this level of investment, we can achieve an 80 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2050 compared to the carbon pollution levels in 2005.
• Make it possible for older water systems to ensure the quality of our drinking water is safe, and that wastewater treatment and storm water overload systems can adequately protect our rivers and lakes by removing industrial and household pollutants from wastewater.

In addition to spending more on what needs to be done, this plan also shows how we can do a better job deciding where and how to invest.

For instance, to attract more private financing for clean energy, the CAP plan calls for a national infrastructure bank with a clean energy loan program and at least a 10-year extension of the investment and production tax credits for renewable energy generation that have been so effective at stimulating private investment in many wind and solar projects. The plan also proposes the creation of a national infrastructure council that would bring together federal agencies to strategically align their infrastructure investments to promote water and energy efficiency efforts and to reduce both traffic congestion and carbon dioxide pollution.

Unfortunately, the Republicans in the House are suggesting cutting funds for transportation infrastructure and suggesting that we rely on the expansion of offshore oil drilling that has very little potential to produce the needed revenues to pay for badly needed investments. In addition, House Republican leaders also plan to hold transportation investments hostage until the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, which would bring dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast for refining, with a large portion sent overseas.

The House Republican leaders hope to move their transportation package after this week’s congressional recess. We suggest they consider a sounder approach that both protects our environment and ensures sufficient revenues to rebuild our infrastructure. CAP’s proposal is a game-changing strategy that could succeed with support from labor, business, environmentalists, and officeholders of both parties. It’s time to get to work on it.

Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Richard Caperton is the Director of Clean Energy Investment at American Progress. Kate Gordon is the Center’s Vice President for Energy Policy. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at American Progress.

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The prospects for economic growth and job creation from increased federal investments in our transportation, water, and energy infrastructure are undeniable and more affordable than most think.

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American families and communities are suffering from the consequences of anemic economic growth and high unemployment. Meanwhile, aging roads, bridges, water systems, and other key public assets are putting our public safety and national economic competitiveness at risk. The challenges present an obvious opportunity for bipartisan action: Boost infrastructure investments that build permanent public assets, generate business for small- and medium-sized companies, create jobs, and enhance our global competitiveness.

The need to repair our infrastructure is not in dispute. In a rare move, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO issued a joint statement in January 2011 calling for Congress to focus on upgrading our national infrastructure: “With the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO standing together to support job creation, we hope that Democrats and Republicans in Congress will also join together to build America’s infrastructure.”

Sadly, that hasn’t happened—yet.

Among the tools at the government’s disposal to boost jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure is one of the options with the greatest impact. After President Barack Obama proposed the American Jobs Act, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, found in 2011 that new federal spending for infrastructure improvements to highways and public schools would generate $1.44 of economic activity for each $1 spent. In reviewing the economic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Congressional Budget Office found that infrastructure investments and purchases by the federal government for goods and services had the largest jobs multiplier impact of all the stimulus elements.

We need to do something similar beginning this year. The plan presented in this paper proposes a reasonable level of new federal investment and how to pay for it, enabling significant progress in bringing our infrastructure up to par. In addition, this paper outlines a set of critical reforms to how the federal government funds, prioritizes, finances, and plans for infrastructure improvements. These reforms can stretch the impact of each dollar invested.

Together these policies will also stimulate sizable new private investment in public infrastructure projects to help close the gap between needs and the resources available. In our plan the proposed new level of federal investment is fully paid for by reasonable increases in specific sources of revenues, including a fee on imported oil, elimination of antiquated and expensive oil tax breaks, and modest increases to a limited number of infrastructure user fees.

Aside from the strong economic impact of elevated spending on infrastructure, the need to do so is indisputable. The state of disrepair of every element of transportation, drinking water and wastewater, and dams and levees systems is well documented, as this paper details in the pages ahead. To a great extent these basic public assets are decades past their useful life or are currently being used far beyond their expected or engineered capacity. Meanwhile our energy infrastructure is woefully outdated.

Before summarizing our proposal, however, let’s first examine what’s holding us back. In large part, the problem is a false perception that the cost of repairing America’s infrastructure requires trillions of dollars in new federal spending. In fact, our plan shows that the most pressing needs of infrastructure can be addressed by improving our use of current funds, making reasonable changes in how users of infrastructure pay for it, and increasing federal spending by roughly $48 billion a year, according to this new analysis by the Center for American Progress.

This paper sets a spending target of the total level of investment needed by subcategory of infrastructure—roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, ports, airports, inland waterways, drinking water, wastewater, and energy—by comparing the detailed and credible needs assessments prepared by respected technical research institutes and federal agencies and comparing that level of needed spending against the amount of federal funds appropriated and funds leveraged by federal investment for the major infrastructure capital investment programs in 2010.

For the purpose of this federal infrastructure plan, we have not examined the need for federal investment in public school buildings. CAP points out in “Spurring Job Creation in the Private Sector” that federal investment in school rehabilitation offers a wise use of federal funds that both addresses a social good and stimulates the private sector.

CAP’s analysis in this report finds that in sum, federal investments represented by federal appropriation levels, alongside federally mandated matching funds from state and local governments, and the estimated level of private investment in capital improvements to our infrastructure that was attracted by federal appropriations was approximately $132.9 billion in 2010. For this paper, to ensure consistency among all data sources, we use FY 2010 as the base year for our analysis. (See the Appendix on page 79 for a breakdown of the methodology used to make our calculations in this paper.)

To meet our country’s infrastructure capital repair and improvement needs, CAP analysis estimates that an additional $129.2 billion a year in new capital investment is warranted over the next 10 years. This research also indicates that investing at this level for each of the next 10 years will appropriately address the backlog in infrastructure repairs and fund needed capacity improvements.

Doing so would bring the total level of infrastructure investment up to $262.1 billion annually, which our research indicates is the minimum required. This paper describes how we arrived at this figure and it recommends a specific set of proposals to generate the funds to pay for this increased level of federal spending and the essential policy changes needed to ensure that our existing and new investments are wisely spent.

If the policies we propose are adopted, CAP’s analysis indicates that private capital investment in infrastructure can be expected to increase to roughly $60 billion per year. The balance of the new investment must come from the public sector.

Our plan recommends that current federal requirements for state matching funds prescribed by the federal transportation and water infrastructure programs accompany new federal investments. If this is the case, then the federal government will need to increase its direct spending on infrastructure by $48 billion a year, which will trigger $11 billion in new state matching investments. On top of direct federal expenditures, this plan proposes approximately $10 billion in new federal loan authority annually. (The cost of the credit subsidies to support these loans is included in the proposed $48 billion increase in federal investment.)

This increase is federal investment represents a 52 percent increase over the approximately $92 billion in FY 2010 federal appropriations for capital infrastructure investments distributed as grants, credit subsidies, and tax expenditures for infrastructure. Although strenuous efforts must be taken to balance the federal budget, we believe they should be done in a manner that permits this increase to be achieved. Based on the 2010 budget, doing so would increase federal spending by less than 1.3 percent compared to the FY 2010 federal budget. (see Figure 1)

Under our plan, the federal government will shoulder less than 50 percent of the cost of this heightened investment, and we propose specific new sources of revenues and shifts in existing infrastructure spending to pay for the federal share.

To pay for the federal share, which we estimate should be $48 billion, we propose the following three new sources of revenue:

• Impose an oil import fee set as a $9.6 per-barrel tax on imported oil, which can generate approximately $36 billion annually.
• End oil tax breaks by eliminating the $4.1 billion in oil production tax subsidies.
• Update the structure of infrastructure user fees, which can generate $8 billion annually.

Further funding can come by modernizing how federal funds are made available for infrastructure improvements, thereby attracting more private funds to finance projects—and reducing the strain on federal, state, and local government treasuries for critical projects. Infrastructure projects offer private investors the opportunity to make long-term investments that offer a predictable rate of return. For instance, if they finance the building of an airport and lease the airport to a regional authority, the terms of the lease will guarantee the investor regular payments that in turn cover their cost of the loan, its interest, and a rate of return or profit to the investors.

Private investors have partnered with state or local governments to build roads, expand highway systems, and build or repair bridges. Typically in this case the private investor pays the public entity upfront an estimated market value for the transportation asset, and then is required under an agreement to cover the cost of improving the asset. In addition, these agreements permit the investor to charge tolls or receive dedicated tax payments while also establishing clear maintenance requirements. Investors enter into these agreements where the tolls or dedicated taxes are projected to cover all costs and profits and are most attractive to investors when the level of earnings has the potential to exceed projections. Federal credit subsidies lower the overall project costs, which in turn reduces the pressure on tolls and/or dedicated taxes, which then has the positive results of making a project more politically and financially feasible.

Private investment in energy infrastructure works very differently. In this sector, investors expect public funds to reduce the risk that their private market product cannot cover its costs in the short run. For instance, while a private investor may be confident that they can recoup their costs and earn a profit from the construction of a wind farm overtime, it can take several years before a wind farm is generating enough revenue to cover operating costs plus debt and profits. Public financing reduces overall project costs and thereby shortens the length of time that a private investor has to wait to begin to receive reasonable returns on an investment.

In each of these critical infrastructure sectors, increased federal resources made available in the form of credit subsidies or tax expenditures can increase the level of private-sector investment.

With this sort of federal support, private investors borrow funds to pay for needed repairs or construction and get paid back over time. Our plan estimates indicate that it’s reasonable to expect $60 billion a year in new privately financed improvements in infrastructure annually if the right federal policies and economic conditions make possible this level of investment.

Roy Kienitz, the former under secretary of transportation, points out, “It’s important to note that most transportation infrastructure projects are not viable candidates for private investment and therefore must rely entirely on public funds backed by federal- or state-imposed user fees or general tax revenues.” Nick Debenedictus, CEO of Aqua America Inc., a New York Stock Exchange-listed water company with 3 million customers across 13 states, makes a similar point with respect to water infrastructure:

With respect to water and energy infrastructure, the lion’s share of investment is already privately financed, but even in these sectors there are infrastructure gaps, such as combined sewer overflows in many of our older cities, where private investors are not willing to invest because the payback is too risky or too far off in the future.

By ratcheting up infrastructure investment by $129.2 billion per year, sizable job-creation gains will be realized. In 2009 the University of Massachusetts Political Economic Research Institute released an analysis of infrastructure spending increases. The study offers the most recent sector-specific analysis of job creation through infrastructure investment. As such it can help us estimate what the sector-by-sector increases in investments would have been had this level of increased investment occurred in 2009.

Since the University of Massachusetts report was released, the United States has experienced encouraging job gains. The economy has grown since the beginning of 2010, adding 2.55 million jobs. We’ve also seen positive economic growth as measured by the nation’s GDP, which as of the third quarter of 2011 was $15.2 trillion compared to $13.9 trillion at the start of 2009. As the economy improves, the job creation and economic growth impact of infrastructure investments can be offset in reduced levels of investment or consumption elsewhere in the economy. Still, the University of Massachusetts study makes a persuasive case that after accounting for offsets in spending in other sectors, public investment in infrastructure contributes to significant GDP growth and jobs gains.

In preparing this report, CAP estimated the level of increased investment infrastructure needed within each subsector of infrastructure based on that analysis. We recommend that the $129.2 billion be distributed among the subsectors in infrastructure as detailed in Figure 3.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included strong “Buy America” provisions that required, to the extent possible, that all materials used for infrastructure construction be manufactured and purchased in America. These provisions helped ensure that Stimulus infrastructure investments made the greatest possible impact on employment and business performance in the United States. The impressive number of jobs that can be generated by increased levels infrastructure spending are more likely to be achieved if similar Buy America provisions are built into each federal statute that allocates funds for surface transportation, aviation, water and energy capital improvements.

Reforms are as essential as new funds

Improving how the government approaches planning for, paying for, and financing infrastructure can increase the impact of every dollar spent and result in higher levels of private investment. Given that so much of this plan relies on more private-sector investment, the reforms necessary to attract this level of investment are essential to achieving our goal. If the reforms we propose are adopted, CAP projects that nearly $60 billion per year in private investments could materialize.

We estimate that most of the new private-sector investment will be directed in the energy sector. With carefully calibrated federal incentives including loans, loan guarantees, grants, and tax credits, we estimate that as much as $40 billion in new annual private investment will enable the build-out of the smart grid as well as expanded renewable energy generation and distribution capacity to desired levels.

The balance of the private investment is likely to occur in the transportation sector. In this sector, new private investment will most likely occur through the formation of new entities where the public sector and private sector join forces to undertake large-scale infrastructure improvements financed with private capital and where the projects generate revenues that can pay back private investors while the private investor and the government share the risk of the project being financially viable. The most likely candidates for this approach to financing are airports, ports, inland waterways, new tolled roads, some existing roads that might be tolled, and tolled bridges.

To reach the desired level of upfront private investment, the public must have a deeper understanding and trust that the government and private partners jointly share the risk and responsibility for a high-quality infrastructure. These models will need to rely on creative partnership structures that offer private investors the opportunity to earn a rate of return beyond interest on their investment. Likewise, partnership agreements need to ensure that the taxpayers are assured that high expectations of performance must be met and are enforceable, users are not exploited to cover costs and profits, risk is appropriately shared among all parties, and workers are not shortchanged in an effort to maximize profits.

In addition, increased private financing opportunities focused on transportation will also require the federal government to more rapidly and readily approve tolling on roads in the federal highway system so that investors can rely on predictable revenues for repayment and earnings. It also will require the creation of a national intermediary such as an Infrastructure Bank that can expertly and expeditiously package high-priority and multistate infrastructure financing projects together with private investors. Increased federal guidance can promote models that protect wages, collective bargaining rights, and the taxpayers and users who are at risk if private partners fail to manage the project responsibly.

In addition, it is not prudent to finance every infrastructure project. When using debt to stretch out the cost of improvements over time, the cost of a project is increased significantly to both account for the interest on the debt and, where necessary, a return on investment for private investors. As a result, financing of infrastructure should be a method employed to help complete meritorious and expensive projects that would be too burdensome to pay for upfront.

Increasing the degree to which infrastructure improvements are paid with either public or private investment or debt will permit us to complete more projects in the short term. It also means that projects must have sufficient direct user fee collections and public sources of revenue to pay back investors of the debt, interest, and a rate of return or profit. Other public improvements can be and should be paid for with federal and matching local government grants. Here, too, federal reforms are needed to stretch the impact of current and future public investments in infrastructure.

First we must adopt formulas for distributing federal infrastructure funds that guarantee that all funds are allocated based on objective measures of need. Current federal funding formulas meet far too many political goals instead of the true purpose of the appropriations. For instance, the current formulas that distribute federal Highway Trust Fund grants to states distribute nearly 10 times the amount of funding per capita to Alaska when compared to California. Meanwhile California has more than 52 times as many people as Alaska has; it is home to the nation’s largest port, which means its infrastructure has to support the nation’s largest highway freight traffic; and California has 13 times the number of miles of roadways as Alaska has.

Similarly, federal, state, and local infrastructure planning needs to rely on standardized cost-benefit analysis tools so scarce public funds are invested in projects with the greatest public return. The illogical formula-based distribution of federal funds is often replicated at the state and local levels where funds are spread around so that most localities get a small bit of funding rather than making an objective decision on how best to spend the funds to meet the most compelling need for repair, congestion mitigation, or traveling efficiency.

A more rational approach to determining where and how infrastructure funds are spent should be matched with a solid funding system that provides a predictable flow of revenues. The current on-again, off-again spigot of infrastructure funding undermines efficiency and contributes to the erosion of our assets. Congress must enact a multiyear set of funding bills for all elements of our infrastructure with reliable and ongoing sources of money for investment to remedy this serious defect in our national infrastructure spending programs.

To successfully bring our infrastructure up to par with levels of investment, we propose more than just increasing the level of annual funding available for investment. We must also change how we allocate funds, hold administrators accountable, and engage private-sector partners. At a minimum we must:

• Update our user fee and tax code to index infrastructure-dedicated taxes and excise fees to inflation and ensure a predictable flow of revenues to support a consistent and more robust level of federal infrastructure investment.
• Enact federal infrastructure allocation formulas based on objective measures of costs, need, and benefits—and require states and localities to do the same. Current formulas for the transportation funds, for instance, do not adequately take into account need for improvements needed to address congestion in spite of the fact that congestion is a leading cause of accidents and rising costs for commuters and goods movement.
• Use federal policy tools to attract more private investment in infrastructure projects so that new large-scale improvements can be privately financed and paid for by users.
• Create a National Infrastructure Bank to optimize the level of private investment in infrastructure, and ensure necessary large-scale and multistate infrastructure projects are undertaken.
• Create a national infrastructure planning council to integrate federal agency infrastructure planning across sectors and improve how we plan, procure, and manage the construction and repair of our public assets.
• Improve our federal and state infrastructure planning by employing a comprehensive, multisector approach based on objective metrics that allocate funds to projects that meet critical public safety, congestion, delays to goods movement, pollution, and other capacity challenges.
• Explore options to bring water infrastructure improvements under one roof and in an agency that can give priority focus to improvements needed to our water treatment, dams, levees, ports, and inland waterway systems.
• Increase the degree to which we are making progress repairing existing infrastructure.

These reforms can result in a better use of public funds and as a result can moderate the level of increased investment needed in the future.

This plan is a triple win for America. It will create jobs, increase the profitability of the small- and medium-sized companies that provide the construction materials for these projects, and leave to the next generation a full complement of safe, modern, and efficient public assets.

In the pages that follow, this paper describes our country’s infrastructure spending needs by infrastructure category, details where the new investments should be focused, and proposes a strategy to raise the necessary revenue. We take a comprehensive approach in addressing the infrastructure repair and capacity needs of our transportation system, energy system, drinking and wastewater treatment and distribution, as well as dams and levees. This blueprint is grounded in a rigorous review of our needs, a practical approach to raising federal funds, and the adoption of a set of commonsense reforms that will improve the impact of all public infrastructure spending. (see Figure 4)

While the level of new spending is substantial, it will have a significant impact on employment and demand, and we propose to pay for the increased level of public investment with taxes and fees that are aligned with our policy goals. The balance of this report describes the level of new investment needed by subsector of infrastructure, a limited set of taxes and fees that fully offset the increased level of federal expenditure, and reforms to increase the impact of each dollar invested.

Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow with the Economic Policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Download this report (pdf)

Download the introduction and summary (pdf)

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SOURCE: AP/Douglas C. Pizac

Vickie Chaplin loads patient samples into a machine for testing at Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. A new report shows the rapidly expanding genetic and genomic clinical laboratory testing industry in the United States currently supports 116,000 jobs and $16.5 billion in national economic output.

This article was originally published on Science Progress

The era of medical genetic testing is upon us. At least that’s the impression one would get after reading this new Battelle report commissioned by The American Clinical Laboratory Association. The ACLA report shows the rapidly expanding genetic and genomic clinical laboratory testing industry in the United States currently supports 116,000 jobs and $16.5 billion in national economic output.

This report builds on earlier research from Battelle that looked more broadly at the economic impact and return on the federal investment in the Human Genome Project. The study of the HGP found that the public investment of $3.8 billion spread between 1988 and 2003 yielded $796 billion in economic output, and created nearly 4 million years of full-time employment, or job-years, between 1988 and 2010. This farsighted, bipartisan investment in genomics research helped seed new biotech industries, which in 2010 alone added $67 billion to U.S. gross domestic product—the largest measure of growth in our economy—created $20 billion in personal income for American families, and sustained 310,000 public- and private-sector jobs.

This $3.8 billion public investment in basic research yielded a 14,000 percent return for the economy, so it is no wonder that the ACLA is revisiting the investigation into public investment in biomedical research—it pays. The new study focused more narrowly on the economic impact of genetic and genomic clinical tests developed by the biomedical industry. Battelle’s new report brings to light figures about the benefits of genomic science and research that are just as impressive as the HGP results. According to the report:

Built upon U.S. investment in basic science and translational biomedical research, U.S. industry has produced a broad range of high-value biomedical technologies and products that create high-paying jobs and sustain America’s leadership in the modern innovation economy.

Spawned by the Human Genome Project itself, Battelle found that the genetic and genomic testing industry is currently contributing “more than 116,000 U.S. jobs; nearly $6 billion in personal income for U.S. workers; $9.2 billion in value-added activity; and $16.5 billion in national economic output.” The state and federal taxes collected from this young industry have states competing for the high-tech jobs and revenue generated by the highly profitable sector.

Battelle cites the states’ implementation of strategic planning to attract new biotech firms by “creating tax and regulatory environments to support and expand growing companies” and “supplying capital for facilities funding.” This 2008 report goes on to discuss the close working relationship states are developing with the firms to “develop and create a skilled workforce.” Now here is a jobs plan in action.

But looking beyond the numbers, the genetic testing industry is helping usher in a new era of biotechnology, personalized medicine, and forensics. According to the study, the genetic testing industry is already leading to positive outcomes in diverse fields such as:

Predicting risk of disease, screening newborns, directing clinical management, identifying carriers, and establishing prenatal or clinical diagnoses or prognoses in individuals, families, or population, as well as use for forensic and identity purposes.

The growth of this industry is paving the way for precision diagnoses and targeted therapies that improve health care outcomes. Oak Ridge National Laboratory says using genetic testing can give medical professionals a host of new tools to “clarify diagnoses” and make treatment more effective. One case in point: One study of genetic versus conventional diagnosis for retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer, found the ability to act on “predictive” genetic tests “can help to save the vision and avoid unnecessary (and invasive) eye examinations for [patients] and their close relatives.” In conclusion the study found genetic diagnosis to be “cheaper” than conventional methods.

Treatments for diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer—all diseases thought to have hereditary indicators—comprise 75 percent of U.S. health care costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. So the ability to detect these diseases through genetic testing long before the symptoms set in may reduce costs associated with costly emergency treatments, and improve the lives of many, though such knowledge comes with its own set of ethical questions, particularly in the case of Alzheimer’s.

But the promise of genetic testing and personalized medicine can only be attained if we continue to invest in publicly funded research, and if we are willing to make some tricky ethical choices, whether they mean choosing to know what’s in our genes, or allowing our genetic information to be used in large longitudinal data sets.

Even Craig Venter, a renowned NIH researcher and biotech CEO who famously competed with the federal government to help unravel the human genome, advocated for the need for federal investment in a hearing before the House Commerce Committee in 2003. “To enjoy the promise of personalized and preventative genomic medicine, we must compare the genomes of tens of thousands of people to better understand the genetic causes of complex diseases,” he said. “Going forward, it is critical that both the NIH and DOE continue to support innovative projects that constantly encourage technological innovation and drive down the costs of sequencing.”

The sequencing of the entire human has decreased “100 fold” since the first human genetic tests became available. The U.S. National Library of Medicine has found “The cost of genetic testing can range from under $100 to more than $2,000, depending on the nature and complexity of the test.” As of 2011, it cost just under $10,000 to sequence a person’s entire genome. That cost reflects a significant “outpacing of Moore’s Law” considering that the first genomes cost nearly $100 million to sequence. (see table)

The cost decrease of whole genome sequencing to $1,000 has long been the point at which it is considered cost effective enough to have as a standard medical test. According to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, 2012 is likely to be “the year that the cost of whole genome sequencing will reach approximately $1,000.” And beyond the economics, the commission is also helping to sort through some of the ethics and privacy questions to genomic research, such as how whole-person genomic information is collected and stored, and what constitutes informed consent.

From the medical march toward increasing efficiency and accuracy in health care services, to the need to drive down costs, public investment in genetic medicine has provided new avenues for lawmakers and medical professionals to achieve their goals. The fact that such investment creates new industries and jobs is a silver lining that should make for easy legislative budgeting. As the debate rages on over whether or not government spending can create jobs or not, we need to continue to distinguish between spending and smart investments with positive economic and public health returns. As Battelle has once again demonstrated, federal funding for science, research, and development are some of the smartest investments we can make in our long-term economic future.

Jason Thomas is a Science Progress intern.

This article was originally published on Science Progress

SOURCE: AP/Danny Johnston

Highway construction, much like this scene on Interstate 430 and 630 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and other forms of infrastructure development are essential to creating jobs and boosting the economy.

See also: Now Is the Time to Fix Our Broken Infrastructure by Heather Boushey; Not Fixing Our Infrastructure, Not Creating Jobs by Donna Cooper; Infrastructure Spending Builds American Jobs by Kristina Costa and Adam Hersh

Just as America refocused its war resources on building our nation’s highway system after World War II, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address included a courageous call for Congress to redirect half of the funds formerly claimed for the war in Iraq to rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. His strong pitch for putting Americans to work repairing our infrastructure is an essential element of the president’s strategy to help the middle class grow and prosper.

At first glance it would appear that the president’s call to invest in infrastructure should enjoy wide bipartisan support. The leadership of both parties in Congress is on record as strong advocates for rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, rail, ports, and airports. On Fox News earlier this week, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said he wants the president to follow the recommendations of the White House Jobs and Competitiveness Council on increasing federal investments in infrastructure (look for the transcript on the speaker’s blog). And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is on the record saying, “Everybody knows we have a crumbling infrastructure. Infrastructure spending is popular on both sides. The question is how much are we going to spend.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also strongly support President Obama’s infrastructure plans.

But bipartisanship isn’t always what it seems, especially when it comes to infrastructure. In 2011 Republicans in the House and Senate unveiled a new strategy that linked new infrastructure investments with divisive environmental proposals. They know this linkage is unacceptable to the president, Senate Democrats, and most of the American public. Yet congressional Republicans are making this push so they can block movement to create jobs and rebuild our infrastructure while sounding like they are in favor of policies that do both.

This is a serious claim, but the evidence is clear. In the past year, instead of rolling up their sleeves and drafting long-term highway and aviation spending bills, the House leadership cranked out a package of bills that include measures to weaken clean water and clean air protections and to restrict union organizing. They disingenuously called this a "jobs package."

In spite of the compelling evidence that federal investments in infrastructure are an effective tool for creating jobs—the U.S. Department of Transportation 2007 estimates indicated that $1 billion in highway investments can create 27,800 jobs—this “jobs package” included the House-passed fiscal year 2012 budget bill that makes deep cuts in spending for highway and other surface transportation repairs. This package of bills willfully neglects the dire state of our aging infrastructure and the need to create more well-paying construction jobs.

They haven’t stopped there. While ignoring the president’s very popular American Jobs Act, they’ve joined the all-out offensive campaign to push the environmentally dangerous Keystone pipeline project, claiming it as their solution to the jobs crisis. This project is more like a jobs pipedream. It’s already three years behind schedule and may never see the light of day due to broad-based U.S. opposition to building the pipeline, including from the Republican governor of Nebraska, who opposes the pipeline route through his state.

None of this is news to the House Republicans. They are desperate to shift attention away from their failure to advance legislation to address our nation’s crumbling infrastructure because they are more concerned with blocking a jobs victory for President Obama that would help him win the 2012 presidential election.

Emblematic of this strategy was the announcement in a November House leadership press conference where Speaker Boehner indicated that he intended to release a multiyear highway funding bill early in 2012 and fund it with revenues dependent on a massive expansion in oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on public lands, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The only problem is that the House leadership knows that this drilling-dependent approach is likely to be dead on arrival in the Senate. Just this past May, 57 senators voted against a motion to proceed to consider the House bill to permit expanded offshore oil-and-gas drilling.

If the House leadership were sincere about creating new construction jobs, then why not start by getting behind a bill that can pass both chambers so that private contractors can get to work repairing more of the 150,000 bridges that need it or the $52.3 billion in improvements needed at the nation’s airports? Instead we are now on the eighth temporary extension of a federal highway bill that expired in 2009 and now only runs through the end of March 2012.

Then there’s the Federal Aviation Administration funding bill. Yesterday before the president’s State of the Union address, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) held a vote for the 23rd temporary extension of the legislation that will provide funding for our airport safety and construction only through the end of February 2012. These extensions enable the status-quo level of inadequate funding for infrastructure to limp along while our national assets crumble.

The House Republicans have blocked the passage of a long-term aviation funding bill for the past two years, demanding that arcane and unfair union election rules be included in the bill. As of today a compromise among all parties takes the union issue off the table. But there are many more details to work out, including the level of funding and what is funded. Given the Republican track record on passing the legislation that is needed to rebuild our infrastructure, it is premature to consider this aviation funding bill a done deal.

The House is not the only problem. Sen. Reid late in 2011 put the president’s American Jobs Act, which included $60 billion to repair our schools and fund a National Infrastructure Bank, to a vote, but Senate filibuster rules that require 60 favorable votes to put a bill on the floor for consideration made moving this infrastructure funding bill impossible. After failing to reach that 60-vote threshold, Sen. Reid said, “Republicans think that if the economy improves, it might help President Obama. So they root for the economy to fail and oppose every effort to improve it.”

Indeed, Sen. McConnell blocked passage of the Senate version of the Jobs Act while lambasting the president for pointing it out and blasting the Senate Democrats for not working with the House Republicans to reach a compromise. But that statement begs the question of why McConnell isn’t working with his own party’s leadership in the House to make sure the Senate receives a bill that has a chance of a positive vote.

The answer is clear: The Republican leadership is very concerned that responding to the American popular call for infrastructure investment will benefit President Obama politically—never mind the pain suffered by the American people and our future economic competitiveness by their failure to act. The president should not be deterred, however, by the roadblocks he faces in Congress. In his speech in Kansas this past December, he summoned the nation to redouble its commitment to an economy that lifts all boats. Echoing President Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive sentiments, he said:

We simply cannot return to this brand of "you’re on your own" economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country. We know that it doesn’t result in a strong economy. It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and in its future. We know it doesn’t result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

Just as the creation of our middle class finds it roots, in part, in the building of our infrastructure, so too is the restoration of our infrastructure essential to the restoration of the breadth and vibrancy of America’s middle class.

Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

See also:

• Now Is the Time to Fix Our Broken Infrastructure by Heather Boushey
• Not Fixing Our Infrastructure, Not Creating Jobs by Donna Cooper
• Infrastructure Spending Builds American Jobs by Kristina Costa and Adam Hersh