© National Journal Group Inc.
Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2007

“I think there is a myth about how anti-regulation this administration really is.” — John Marburger

White House science adviser John Marburger has weathered a continual line of storms since he came to Washington early in President Bush's first term. During his tenure, Marburger has helped manage debates over everything from Bush's controversial positions on climate change and stem-cell research to accusations that some political appointees have manipulated scientific data.

Marburger, 66, came to head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy after serving as director of the Energy Department's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. Born in Staten Island, N.Y., he grew up outside of Washington and attended Princeton and Stanford universities. He spent 14 years as the president of the State University of New York (Stony Brook) and remains on leave. He was also a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

"I had no Washington experience at all before I came to this job, and consequently I didn't have many expectations for the job either," Marburger said. "I've tried to make it work in the context of this administration, and the people, personalities, and the issues that have come up during the last six years."

Marburger sat down with National Journal on November 21 to discuss global warming, the California forest fires, and recent scientific breakthroughs in stem-cell research. Following is an edited version of that conversation. For previous Insider Interviews, click here.

Marburger: The Office of Science and Technology Policy is part of a routine process for reviewing testimony by senior administration officials. When we looked at the CDC testimony, we found what I describe as an overall lack of specificity about the degree of likelihood of certain climate impacts, their global distribution, and their specific nature.

For example, the testimony describes health impacts from reduced agricultural productivity that are expected to be very different in Africa than in the U.S. We did not propose cutting out entire pages. We did propose specific changes that would have linked the testimony more strongly to the U.N.'s recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report [PDF], where all of these issues are dealt with in some detail.

This process [of reviewing testimony] is administered by the Office of Management and Budget, and they collect the input from all of the relevant policy offices. And after they received our comment, they sent back a recommendation to the CDC that they simply drop whole pages from the beginning of the testimony. Well, that's not what we recommended. When you drop a whole page, undoubtedly it's going to contain perfectly reasonable statements along with the statements that need to be tightened up or changed.

Ordinarily, you would have a back-and-forth process with the agency or the official who was giving the testimony, and they would tune it up. In this case, we got the testimony late on Friday, and the hearing committee wanted their copy of it on Monday. Our climate experts went through it. They were here until 8:30 on a Friday night reviewing it, and sent it in. I assumed that OMB probably also got a lot of other agency responses, and they had to figure out what they should tell the agency. I don't want to speculate on their process.

But somebody probably said, "Well, we're getting all these comments back. Why don't we just ask them to drop the first eight pages?"

That sounds like it was not a good idea. But on the other hand, I can see how it would happen. And it's unfortunate.

Marburger: We worked with the other countries to develop the language, so we think the summary is a fair representation of the three reports.

We've learned a lot in six years. Most scientists who work in this area are impressed with how rapidly certain impacts [of climate change] are being observed. We have certain phenomena that were not discussed then, such as the rapid ice breakup in the Arctic Ocean and the increased acidification of the top layers of the ocean due to the absorption of the carbon dioxide. These are interesting things. And because there have been more measurements taken since 2001, we now can observe the migration of climate zones toward the poles, longer growing seasons, and temperature increases.

Marburger: Because warming is only one of the things that happen [as a result of climate change]. The sea level rises, for example. So I say "climate change."

Marburger: We have a lot of policy measures -- CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standards and tax incentives and direct government aid for innovative alternative-energy projects. All of these things are policy measures. I think there is a myth about how anti-regulation this administration really is. This administration has used regulatory measures and tax incentives for addressing energy issues, which are related to the climate issues. And we're on the verge of addressing the climate issues directly. There is a Supreme Court ruling that mandates that the EPA regulate [carbon dioxide] as a pollutant. So we do have a whole array of policy measures right now whose effect is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and undoubtedly there will be more in the future.

Marburger: The U.S. is on a somewhat different path than other countries. But it's a path that works for us and is appropriate for our role right now. I actually think we're ahead of other countries in investment in alternative-energy technology, which is what we need.

Marburger: In my view, the main problem is the lack of energy alternatives for fossil fuels. The scale of this problem is so great that most alternatives fall far short of what's needed. Right now the only scalable, economically feasible alternative looks to be nuclear power. We're talking about very large quantities of that.

If cap-and-trade were implemented, or some other regulatory approach, it would have to be done very carefully to avoid just shifting [carbon dioxide] emissions from one sector to the other or from one country to another. If you drove industries out of one country into another country where the regulations are different, that doesn't help.

Marburger: That's not exactly what I said. What I said was that science doesn't produce threshold numbers like 2 degrees. That's much too concrete and specific. Why not 1 degree? Why not 3 degrees? We are already seeing impacts like ocean acidification from the increased [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere. We're already seeing some of the effects [of climate change], and they're not good. But the average temperature over the entire globe -- equator to polls, averaged over an entire year, summer, winter, both hemispheres -- that's not a very good measure to use when you're trying to encourage people to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. I was just objecting to this sort of hard-edged number.

It makes much more sense to focus on what you're emitting, and in fact it would make sense to have targets on greenhouse-gas emissions, sector by sector, country by country, that tighten up with time until you actually start dropping the emissions.

That is what the president is trying to do with this initiative to bring the major emitting countries to the table. And sure, it may have to be voluntary at the beginning. It has to be tailored to what the countries can do, what they're willing to do. But you've got to get started. The focus has to be on cutting out the production of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and managing the land so that nature can absorb more [carbon dioxide].

Marburger: We know the temperatures are higher, and we will be seeing some effects of global warming. But many of these extreme events still are within the range of things that we've seen in the past. Unfortunately, the climate histories of the Southwest suggest that the past couple of centuries have been wetter than the long-term historical average. So we might just be seeing a return to the norm in the Southwest.

In the Southeast, it's not possible to associate a particular event with a warming trend. Some climate models show the Southeast getting wetter with climate change. So you have to be a little bit careful about how you make predictions on this. You've got to look at the whole weather system that's being driven by the science.

Now, with the fires in Southern California. I lived in Southern California in the '60s and '70s, and I experienced fierce Santa Ana winds during that period. I watched serious fires in exactly the same areas that have been catching fire today. And I also watched development grow in those areas. I saw California develop very rapidly. People moved in and built houses in those areas that had been on fire. And I'll tell you, if we want to cope with the consequences of climate change, we're going to have to be smarter than that.

Marburger: I don't just whisper about science in the ear of the president. I determine with my colleagues when the president needs to make a decision about science. We usually put together briefing materials in a policy process and then meet with the president. A good example of a purely advisory briefing was after the [December 2004] tsunami. The president was very interested in tsunamis and what would a tsunami warning system look like and how they are caused and what can we do.

I've had meetings with him on climate change. We've had discussions about stem cells -- all of the things you read about in the newspaper. Also about the scientific basis of future economic competitiveness. He's very interested.

Marburger: Yes, I do, especially in the first term, when my office became very heavily involved in homeland-security issues, including the role of science in the new Department of Homeland Security. There are lingering issues like that, where security issues have an impact on science. Visas for visiting scientists, for example. But in the second term, the issues have been much more normal -- building the basis for future economic competitiveness, identifying priorities among areas of science, worrying about the future technical workforce.

Marburger: Yes. Science has become so important in our society and enjoys such high prestige that everybody tries to use it to support their views. Everybody tries to claim a scientific basis for whatever it is they're trying to sell. And so it's inevitable that science is seized on for not just political purposes, but any advocacy purposes. Fortunately, both [political] parties value science.

Marburger: The president's policy was based on an ethical decision, not on science. But the president always had confidence that science would find a way to do this. He was very optimistic that his ethics-based policy in the long run would not prevent science from finding ways to use this type of cell. And it looks like he might have been right.

It's really quite a remarkable breakthrough. They found the specific coding of the cells, genes that were responsible for the variation of cell characteristics with the development of the organism. It might be more complicated than these four genes that they found. But certainly this is a big breakthrough. Everyone in the scientific community should breathe a sigh of relief as a result of this work. I think it's going to help the very polarized, bitter environment that we've been working in. And the president should be happy about it, too. I know he is.

[ Insider Interview Archives ]

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