Op-ed - SAVING THE WORLD by John P. Flannery

Nobel prize-winning physicist Jack Steinberger, 92,  and John Flannery

How can we expect the United States to save the world when it’s not able to remain open to do its business?

When you have to pay your bills past due and owing, do you get to negotiate and say, well I'll pay if you, Mr Landlord, change your policies and, oh, reduce my rent?  Not very likely!  You live in the real world rather than the tea-induced fantasy factory that’s stymied the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, and put our nation at risk.

In this dystopian context, we have to ask what our government is doing that’s really important, is it doing anything to “save the world,” whether it’s anticipating what we do when we’ve exhausted our fossil fuels as an energy source or how we protect against the annihilating force of a targeted nuclear weapon.

I had the opportunity to listen and talk with Nobel prize-winning physicist, Jack Steinberger, 92, about “saving the world,” although his characterization was more modest, like his manner.

Jack won the Nobel Prize in 1988 “for the neutrino beam method and the double structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”  In other words, he’s real smart.

Aside from its terribly adverse effect on the world’s environment, Jack says of our dependence on fossil fuel that it begs the question, what do we do when our fossil fuels run out?  Jack estimates that we have a depleting inventory of oil (lasting 30 years), gas (for about 35 years) and coal (for 60 years).  “How are we going to keep planes in the skies,” said Jack, “when these fuels are gone?”

Jack’s prescriptions are straightforward: 1. Reduce our birth rate, 2. Reduce our consumption, 3. Increase our energy efficiency, and 4. Explore the use of thermal solar energy. 

Thermal solar is Jack’s preferred response to the unsolved challenge, how we store energy from renewables in those times of the day or season when there’s no wind or sun to generate power.

“The Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS), working since 1985 in California, with a huge production capacity,” Jack says, “is one example of what works and is being used right now.” 

It’s a parabolic mirror that reflects the solar radiation to a focal point, where glass tubing containing fluid is heated, and this heat is stored for months at a time, providing not only peak power but also baseload power generation that can displace coal- and natural gas-fired power plants.

Parabolic Mirror – Solar Thermal

Jack was hopeful when he heard our newly minted President Barack Obama speak in Prague, on April 5, 2009, saying, “we must confront climate change by ending the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.”  

By September 2013, however, we are still waiting for initiatives that might accomplish this objective.

As recently as this past weekend, a self-described Cold War bomber pilot, writing in the Post, in a brilliant example of Orwellian newspeak, said “nuclear weapons are instruments of peace.” 

Jack was quite encouraged in in April 2009 when the President took a different tact, promising that he would confront “the spread of catastrophic weapons” that could erase the world “in a single flash of light” and committed his Administration “to seek[ing] the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Jack concurred, “I think there is absolutely no way but to get rid of them, and America is the one who must lead the way.”

When Obama gave a second speech in Berlin this past June, however, he said we have more nuclear weapons than we “need,” but then pushed further down the road any comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and any fissile material cutoff treaty.  The Department of Defense released a report that now we must maintain a deterrent, rather than the President’s earlier promised commitment to disarmament, and we must use our nuclear arsenal to “deter” not only Russia but China as well.  One step forward, two more backward.  Nor is Congress any help.  Many object to any reduction in the nuclear arsenal.

“I can’t imagine using a nuclear weapon,” said Jack, “can’t imagine a war, so we have to solve this problem.  As long as we lead, others will follow.  But we are not leading.”

Perhaps it’s a lot to ask our government to “save the world” when it can’t guarantee that it’s open for 

business.  But saving the world is more than an aspiration; it’s about our very survival.

OP-ED: THE EDGE-UCATION CANDIDATE – AG CUCCINELLI by John P. Flannery

Our outgoing State Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, who wants to be Governor, got a fine higher education himself but, it appears, he hasn’t learned the value of an education for others, certainly not for our children.

We learned early on following his election as AG that he did not respect academic freedom.

Mr. Cuccinelli went after one university researcher’s studies of climate change, Professor Michael E. Mann, because Mr. Cuccinelli couldn’t believe that humans since the industrial revolution could have an adverse effect on climate change. 

Having no evidence of any possible fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli simply subpoenaed a volume of Professor Mann’s private academic materials and correspondence, UVA resisted, and a state judge quashed Mr. Cuccinelli’s attack; so, the AG tried again and the Court said he was wrong again; the Washington Post wrote an editorial saying that Cuccinelli was “determined to embarrass Virginia.” 

The fact that a public official fails to agree with someone else, or a citizen has a different view than a partisan party plank, grants no public official license to disregard that citizen’s constitutional right to free speech, or his right to be let alone from a plainly arbitrary intrusion into his private research papers.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s excesses are offensive and ironic given his hubris, namely, comparing himself with a man who considered his greatest contribution to be the University of Virginia. 

Thomas Jefferson believed a nation that expects to be ignorant and free believes what never was and never will be. 

Mr. Cuccinelli presumes to divine, however, what’s true and treats what he finds disagreeable to be ignorant; this is an unfortunate repressive inclination in a public figure.

The most recent example of our gubernatorial candidate’s dullness to excellence involved the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, a state-chartered regional magnet school. 

Some dimmer lights believe we can “imitate” this school in Loudoun County, so who needs it they say.

U.S. News and World Report ranked the TJ school the best public school in the nation from 2007 through 2013.  We are talking high AP scores, national merit semifinalists, participation in the U.S. Physics Olympiad Team, Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists, and more.  You are admitted as a student from six local jurisdictions including Loudoun County based on an admissions test, academic achievement, recommendations and an essay.  A quarter of the graduating class go on to attend U. VA.  Others attend William and Mary, VPI and colleges out of state.

State and County government funds underwrite the school.  Corporations from the defense and hi-tech industries also contribute to the school.

Surrounding jurisdictions have supported the school with funding so that the competitive open enrollment will continue to be open to students from other counties including Loudoun.

The school’s physical plant is getting long in the tooth since it was first established in 1964 and needs a capital investment to make the necessary capital improvements by 2016. 

Surrounding counties have been asked to contribute, done their legal due diligence and decided they may do so.

But here’s the buzz kill, outgoing Loudoun Delegate Joe May, himself a hi-tech wizard and patent holding inventor, asked the Attorney General whether the counties could contribute to the capital cost of maintaining TJ’s physical plant, specifically the Loudoun County School Board. 

In trial work, it’s always said a question is not evidence of anything, only the answer.  Few agree that’s true.  May asked the question in order to undermine the necessary capital funding, Loudoun County’s share of the cost at $7.75 million, and thus our children’s opportunity to attend that extraordinary school.  Mr. Cuccinelli gave Joe what he asked for, an opinion that jurisdictions other than Fairfax may not provide capital funding.

As other lawyers who have studied the issue find no such problem, even after Mr. Cuccinelli’s adverse opinion, and Mr. Cuccinelli is smart enough to get it right, a fair conclusion might be that Mr. Cuccinelli is playing to his base in a GOTV (Get-out-the-vote) low-turnout election, to those who oppose public schools generally, and, at the same time, satisfying an outgoing constituent delegate carrying water himself for County Board members who don’t want to contribute a dime more to the TJ school. 

We don’t need a governor who plays political football with our children’s opportunities to excel, nor one who lacks the imagination and foresight to support an innovative educational resource that will otherwise be replaced by even more H1B visas for bright science students and professionals from other nations, to make up for the scientists that our schools fail to produce.

GAZETTE COLUMN: PEOPLE GO POLAR ON THE POTOMAC - J. Flannery

Some people jump into icy cold water for no good reason. 

By contrast, on January 22, 2011, 200 men and women, from 7 to 74 years of age, with an air temperature of 17 degrees, took a frigid polar bear plunge into the Potomac at Maryland’s National Harbor, downstream from the U.S. Congress, demanding that our political leaders save real polar bears from extinction – as well as their human kissin’ cousins.

The demand is that Congress adopt policies to decrease carbon emissions from 388 parts per million of carbon dioxide to 350 parts, a safe level (see http://www.350.org/ )

My wife Holly planned to swim while I held hot drinks, foot warmers, towels, a thick terry cloth robe, my camera and yellow sheets for notes.  You can see why I couldn’t make the plunge myself.

Some disbelievers might wonder if cold weather doesn’t contradict the science of global warming.  But extreme weather conditions are averaged with other climate phenomenon.  They don’t change the fact that the average temperature worldwide has gone up 1.4 degrees since 1880, and that we had our hottest temperatures in 400 years in the last several decades.  The average temperature in Alaska, Western Canada and Eastern Russia have increased almost twice as fast as the global average.  We’ve seen Antarctica melting.  Islands and shore lines are receding.  Arctic ice is disappearing rapidly, and an ice free summer there is now foreseeable.  Polar bears are at risk, as they lose their sea ice habitat, the ice platforms they hunt from and that protect them from drowning.  They are losing more young, starving, and every fifth bear is dying.

Hundreds milled in clusters with polar bear caps and hot coffee in hand, the last folk song finished, the wind blowing, ice rimming the Potomac, as Mike Tidwell, the founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (www.chesapeakeclimate.org), reassured the polar bear plungers in waiting that some swimmer had been doing this for years, proving you “can survive the plunge,” and remind congress that “the science isn’t lying.” 

Last year, the National Research Council released, “Advancing the Science of Climate Change,” confirming once again that global warming is caused by what we humans do.

Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards said she was “warming up” to the plunge and invited citizens to “lean on us” in Congress to get something done; she was backed up by San Francisco 49ers inside linebacker, NaVorro Bowman.

As the polar plungers dropped off their clothes in nearby tents and emerged unprotected in swimsuits in the winds along the icy banks, a cheer went up and they raced as one splashing into the icy waters.

Among those in trunks was Franciscan Father Jacek Orzeshowski who told us that he made the plunge because combating global warming was a “moral and spiritual challenge” and “faith communities are embracing this movement,” so we can “defend the powerless,” avoid extinction, and save the “awesome diversity of life;” he prayed that all who plunged may enjoy the “fire of grace in our bellies.”  May it be the same for those who fight global warming everywhere!