Jerry Schnoor is awesome. He just published this editorial in Environmental Science & Technology (the top journal in environmental science and environmental engineering) with some brilliant damnations like Americans don’t realize how far out of whack we are with respect to any measure of sustainability. We are so far off, we don’t know what the questions are.
This type of scientific journalism is fantastic. It seems like at some point half a century ago scientists decided that it was unprofessional to have strong feelings or a personality. I’m glad to see that starting to fade a bit. Research and data analysis, sure, should be unbiased. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be human beings when we’re talking about how academia relates to the reality outside the ivory tower. If US environmental policy is just plain stupid, let’s call it stupid. That’s more meaningful to most people than citing data, because someone else is always going to have a stupid counter-argument with smoke and mirrors to make the data seem irrelevant to the average person.
Which gets me to a second point: scientific literacy. How much would be enough for most people, to make informed political decisions? I don’t know.
