raise money for public libraries throughout the state. miami book fair international is held from november 11 through 18. it features more than 350 authors and booktv will be live from miami on november 17th and 18th for complete schedule of author presentations call in interviews and more visit booktv.org. massachusetts hosts the boston book fair from november 16 through the 18th. with panel discussions on rare books, and the collection and restoration of antique works. weak tv will be covering several several panels from the event. checkbooktive.org for air times. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area. e-mail us atbooktv@c-span.org. ..

and before we start, you have seen the commercials that go something like this when you pay to much for cable you throw things and many for things people think you have anger issues and when people think think you have anger issues your schedule clears up and when your schedule clears up you grow scraggly beard and you start taking in stray animals and when you start taking in stray animals you can't stop taking in stray animals. i have my own version of that. your doctor insists you have a

check of benemann or doctor give you a check-up he insist you have a tetanus booster and you wake up the next day feeling you have been beaten by a guerilla with a baseball that. you wander out into the street and get hit a truck. don't get a check-up when you feel perfectly well. [laughter] if i seem to be heading that way, please stop me. so today's event. there has been a battle going on for sometime now in dueling books with sharp exchanges on the internet and the blogosphere over whether not one side of the political spectrum is particularly more anti-scientific than the other. and leaning out the gate for the conservatives are anti-science is a fellow named christopher many who wrote the republican -- mooney argues that so many republicans hold heterodox views on evolution and climate change as to make the entire political philosophy antiscience and

anti-scientific. others including myself and alex and this is that we actually met have pointed out the situation is far from clear that progressives progressives have a whole host of positions that can be described as anti-science from their scaremongering over genitically-modified foods to their embrace such as the lennear no threshold model of -- to their fixation on organic agriculture and the anti-vaccine movement although i'm having second thoughts about that. there's a whole host of issues which antiscience as you can imagine. some of our journalists have not yet commented as an eyeball call your attention to key scorer who has been moving towards a position of saying let's call it the latest. both sides have their issues and have problems. the left particular sick station on genitically-modified foods is

killing many people but until now the response has been somewhat scattershot. with just blockheads and articles and things like that until now. because now alex berezow, how do you pronounce that, berezow and editor of realclearscience and his co-author founder of science 2.0 and on line science communication community have brought together the various strands of antiscience and progressive part of the political sector and actually do something i really respect which is they start the book they start an actual book by sang okay let's talk about the definitions of things so we know what we are talking about. alex is back on his microbio, microbiology which i had molecular biology with my masters but it's clear the

scientific education did not go in vain. when i got my copy of "science left behind" their work chapters i would judge best on energy and environment or clean energy chaos. i got a freebie in that title. and i was pleased to see they take on some of the aspects of energy policy favored by toilets that don't work two showerheads that really didn't get you clean and the point out very good points about water conservation where if you really were worried about water conversation you would not be looking at showerheads and toilets because most of the water uses industrial and irrigation so forth and you have to get down to the 1% level when you're talking about consumer use of water. you would then be trying to knock that down by 10% by going to a smaller toilet and shower so i'm hoping that -- one of my

pet peeves which is they sacrifice their environment for their pet projects. this is what got me a public policy. when i was a kid i was raised by my mother who was a bit crazy. she was a treasure hunter. she love to go processing for gold and collecting coins and things like that so i spent many summers in the mojave desert. she would tell people we would go digging for gold in what she meant was i would go digging for gold and she would hand for gold. once i had done all that digging but believe it or not most people don't know this, there are whole prospecting groups and we were involved in one in california and in 1978, perhaps 70 for the environment also trying to get the mining act revised to stop the ownership of mining lands in the mojave desert because of the kangaroo rat that was endangered in the

desert tortoise were in danger. by introduction to the tension between mixed-use and nonuse. the environmental's were adamant they were going to wallop the entire mojave desert and they did. in fact it became impossible to use recreational vehicles to go out and maintain mining so we wound up giving our side. now, of course when they want to put solar installations out there they talk to the environmentalist and they say that sums up the good fight and they talk about things like gentle mowing of the cacti that take 100 years to grow back and they locate hundreds of tortoises even though they moved them ridiculously high and apparently kangaroo rats no longer matter because they want their solar -- so the same is true where they happened to notice that people don't live in the mojave desert so it's okay to run power lines through state parks to get them

to the city where as before this of course you couldn't even look at a park with an idea of running up arlen. so without the concerns woods take us through the "science left behind" and feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left. we will have time for q&a later because i will reach out and pop them with the book of the at the runs out late. >> thank you for that very kind introduction. our book is "science left behind" about the rise of the anti-scientists left called feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left and as ken said my name is alex and i got my ph.d. in microbiology from the university of university of washington and more bridgeland editor of real clear science.com. so just a little bit about me. my background is entirely microbiology and in fact a friend of mine became an ob/gyn so i looked like an over geek in that picture. that is me working on in anaerobic chain which you may

have come across at one point. week crew lots of extremely bacteria napping. i went to the university of university of washington and government ph.d. in 2010 and became a scientist so i've been in the real world for two years. my personal sides philosophy is rather straightforward and simple. if you're not an expert it's best to accept mainstream science. science should always come before politics and that means ideology or political parties are not the on criticism cell in my view here i play for team science. i don't come to a talk playing for red -- team rector team blue. i think we should always try to purge anti-scientific thinking even if it comes from our friends and political allies. so then why science left behind? why take on the less? the media is very quick to cover anti-scientific elites from conservatives in particular

global warming in a particular evolution. todd akin is made rather enlightening comments about pregnancy and for days this was a front-page story about how he doesn't understand reproductive biology. however when someone on the far left says something, one president. obama says vaccines might cause autism that was ignored. and yes he did say that if we will talk about that later in my top. also there have always been several books published on the topic. there are a couple of other books so if you want to find out how the right is bad at science and there's a big market for that. to our knowledge this is the first book on the anti-scientific left for the so progressives are anti-science as well but let's give the devil -- >> within a month of yours. >> progressives are anti-scientists well. it's just that it's not reported by the media.

the media simply looks the other way when their political allies do things that are anti-science. so who are the progressives? what do we mean by progressive? retook david nolan's charter and we kind of relabeled re-relabeled it to take more of our political ideology today. conservatives and libertarians are the easiest to identify. the conservatives are the main train in stream republican party and the libertarians need no introduction, the ron paul institution. the left's however it's a little bit trickier to define because they see them as living into liberals and conservatives -- liberals and progressives. liberals being more like the tony blair, the bill clinton wing of the democratic party, pro-business but they do tend to favor economic outcomes so they want to control economic outcomes. that is their main focus. think of unionized police officers and unionized teachers. regresses our entirely different. these are the people, the

typical tree hugging san francisco liberals, progressives. that is who we are talking about in these are people who are interested in not just economic outcomes but also social outcomes so whereas conservatives are interested in talking about drugs and progressives are interested in talking about where the complex off on your french fries and whether not you can have a plastic bag or junk of soda. michael bloomberg, great example of a progressive. he is banning cups in new york city so that is what we are talking about. we are talking about that ideology of the left, the progressive ideology. so what are some myths that are held by today's progressives? we have got about five myths that we tend to focus on the first two because those are the eight juicy ideas, the bad ideas are actually. one is that natural things are good. two, unnatural things are bad. three, i unchecked science will destroy us and four science is

only relative anyway and five, science is on our side. the first one, we won't have much time to get into these myths. if you want to get my book you will learn how about them there. we will talk mostly about the most famous for aggressive today, president barack obama and his resume when it comes to science but just to give you an idea of why these myths are important, natural things are good. that's behind the organic food movement. that's behind the rejection of genitically-modified food. a natural things are bad. that is the fear chemicals, the fear of bpa, the fear of chemistry things that are unnatural. pesticides, fertilizers. unchecked science will destroy such as nuclear power. science is only relative anyway. there are always other scientists who disagree and what

we talked about at length progressives believe that science is on their side so what are the results of these myths? well, protests and lots of protests. just to give you some idea of the topics we cover in our book, on the top left we have cdc outline flu shots are toxic. i know ken will actually agree that flu shots are toxic after his experience. we have a protester you're saying that vaccines are toxic and the centers for disease control the most respected microbiological organization in the world is lying to you about vaccines. on the right we have, the upper right we have a big baby bottle in the bpa movement. don't give your baby milk from baby bottles because they will all die from a plastic baby bottles made from in the bottom, this is what we wanted to put on the cover of her book. this is the anti-genetic modification movement, the demon corn because corn is

genitically-modified to have a toxin which kills insects so they don't like that. we told the publisher this is a picture in our book and they went crazy when i put it on the cover of the book. unfortunately that was the book cover we wanted. also basic scientific research has been opposed by members of the progressive left. the upper left corner, they are opposed to all animal research. keep in mind this this isn't jut chimpanzee of research which we probably shouldn't be doing or our primate research like big primates like varela's. they are opposed to almost all animal research, the rats, the mice, pretty much all of her medical research comes from mice and rats and actually some of the smaller primates like rhesus monkeys and cats. upper right corner, there is a sign and a yard that says stop bothering us, we support science. you may not be able to see what happens. this is in los angeles.

there was a neighborhood of scientists that lived in an area and protesters would not protest at the university. they would find out where the researchers lived in protest outside their house. and this of course is frightening for scientist. in fact when i was at the university of washington we would get e-mails once a year saying the animal rights protesters were back, be careful, don't engage with them. because they have a history of violence. they have a history of intimidating researchers and just to give you an idea of how loony these people are, one of these neighbors puts up a sign that says stop bothering us, we support science in support of his neighbor. one of the animal researchers crossed off science in said torture, we support torture. that is how they view people like me and ken, we we are torturous. we are not helping, we are not helping medical science we are animal torturers. the bottom right, lawrence summers who was fired from harvard essentially, he was

pushed out the door for making the radical claim that men and women might be different. he essentially put a very controversial but biologically plausible idea that there is a genetic asis to intelligence and that maybe men and women are different when it comes to intelligence. yeses said jihad is its controversial. there is some scientific evidence to support what he says in their scientific evidence which does not support what he says. the point is it's a worthwhile discussion to have. he was essentially fired for that, the president of harvard. and in the lower left corner is a member of greenpeace engaging in an act of eco-terrorism in australia. they were testing a field of genitically-modified crops and they said it was toxic so they came in and they took a weedwhacker and mowed down the entire field. then they complain there isn't

enough testing. >> this is the same thing with the tree farming that was being used to test for the sequestration of greenhouse gas. they were looking to see if they can increase the absorption of greenhouse gas with the breeding of the plant. they didn't like that so they burn down the growth. >> so this is obviously a big problem for progressives because science now can actually maybe help global warming with genetic modification that they are so ideologically opposed to genitically-modified anything that they're willing to engage in acts of eco-terrorism. and energy production, as you know, the far left seems to be opposed to any and all forms of energy period. in the upper left corner you have people protesting nuclear power. you had angela merkel who is the new iron chancellor of germany. she decided because of the

protest to shut down nuclear-powered. she is a nuclear physicist says she really should know better. or a tidal wave that she gave into environmentalist pressure and decided to shut down nuclear power plans. in the upper right-hand corner you have fracking cause cancer which is not true and you have some guy dressed as a weasel dancing. not sure what that's about. in the lower left corner you have, no dams. they don't want hydroelectric power and in the argentinian chile border so they are opposed to hydrilla to power in the bottom right you have some guy who's supposed to wind power and you may not be able to read this but it's classic. no industrial land, capitalism still blows. i'm not sure what that has good capitalism but he made sure he fitted in. >> it's the weasel.

that might actually turn it off. >> okay. sorry. so, let's review just for a second. progressive protesters don't want vaccines, chemicals, genitically-modified crops, research into genitically-modified crops, animal research, gender-based biology research, wind power, hydroelectric power. can someone actually believe all of that yet still be considered pro-science? how exactly do progressives think of scientist? probably like this. crazy people who are out to destroy the planet. so, i know this crowd wanted check but usually when i was giving a talk in seattle, which they are not conservative people, they would say something to the point of progressive activists of course are silly. is really the progressive politicians who are driving the

real conversation. they are the real pro-science people. okay, really? let's look. president barack obama, the number one progressive politician in america come he says in his inaugural address january 20, 2009 we will restore science to his rightful place. that's a lofty goal for a politician. how did he do? on the subject of embryonic stem cells, you might remember when george w. bush banned embryonic stem cells but he didn't. he never banned it. that was, we will be generous and say misinformation perpetuated by the media. he never banned stem cells. he did not limit funding to preexisting cell lines in 20 ones dems have lines were available after 2001. obama promised to fix that so he issued an executive order on march 92009. what did that do? it lifted the ban the quote

unquote bandh van on federal funding so today as the time i put this talk together a month ago there were 178 stem cell lines available for federal funding but 160 lines available globally so we increased it from 21 lines to 178 lines. most notably, they must be derived. embryonic stem cells must be derived from leftover in vitro fertilization embryos and permission is required from parents. that has the effect of really limiting the number of embryonic stem cells that you can get. so the idea that the doors open on embryonic stem cell research is fiction. he did not. george bush left the door open to embryonic stem cell research and barack obama nudged it slightly further. he did not blow the doors off the research. and here is an ethical issue and i think this is a worthwhile issue that no one really knows

about but it's a worthwhile issue to discuss. his policy does little to nothing to address the hundreds of thousands of embryos that are sitting in freezers all over the country right now. that no one wants essentially and they're just sitting in freezers. the reason that happens is because people who have in vitro fertilization, they will usually make six or seven embryos and then they will and plans two or three into the woman and hopefully one of them will take and they will have the baby. the other remaining three or are for the put in a freezer indefinitely and they are just sitting there. they have been sitting there for decades. so his policy really does nothing to address hundreds of thousands of samples sitting in freezers all over the country. so the creation of embryos only for research purposes is not allowed so we can create embryos for in vitro fertilization and then if you ask parents can we use your extra embryos for

research that is allowed but you cannot create an embryos specifically for research purposes. that is not allowed. bizarrely, the derivation of human embryonic stem cells from somatic cell nuclear transfer is as a lot. a technology to clone dolly the sheep. we are allowed to do animal research but not allowed to use this technique for humans. >> a quick translation, somatic cells are -- >> skin cells or liver skills or anything other than the sexual cell. what this technology does is it contains a nucleus out of the bodies also body's cell so let's say the nucleus out of one of my skin cells you can then take that and put it into an egg cell, human egg cell or another embryonic stem cell and you can shop that and hopefully if everything works right you can then create a clone of cells that is basically just like the dna. the scary part of the technology is will we be cloning people in

the future and that his band. i think it's probably good idea to them that. what we do need howard's this technology for cloning -- so if you want to clone a new heart or clone a new liver this technique is almost certainly going to be necessary. a necessary tool in our tool belt to do this. that is still not allowed and you cannot use funding for that research either. than the injection of embryonic stem cells into nonhuman primates is not allowed and a pretty decent idea at this point. the point is there are many bioethical issues here that i think need to be very seriously discussed and we haven't discussed them in three years because president president obama fixed the problem and really he did nothing of the sort. he just inched the door open to what george bush had done. barack obama on vaccines unfortunately didn't do a lot better. when he was running for office in 2008 and here is a direct

quote from him. we have just seen a skyrocketing autism rate. some people are suspicious it's connected to the vaccine. this person included. the science right right now is inconclusive so we have to research it. that was in 2008. this is wrong on so many levels that it's hard really to unpack how wrong this is. first of all medical communities have never accepted this link ever. this was only something that made the political round and made its way into mainstream culture. medical doctors and scientists do not support a link between vaccines and autism. also, the science was quote unquote settled in earlier 2002. was suspected that scientist who had a picture of andrew wakefield who was suspected, his research was wrong as early as 2002. in 2011 he was called an outright fraud by the british medical journal. however in 2086 years after a landmark study in 2002

conclusively demonstrated there is no link between vaccines and autism here is barack obama pandering to an anti-vaccine crowd. did things improved when he took the white house, when he took the white house? well, in 2009 you might remember the influenza pandemic where we were all frightened that we are all going to get the flu and died. there was a vaccine shortage in the united states and in fact i remember this quite well because i was encouraging on my friends to get their vaccines and my parents and everybody i knew. microbiologists are very scared of influence and rightfully so. about every 40 years or so we have a major pandemic and sometimes they are very deadly. we are overdue for one of these pandemics so this is not fear-mongering. i'm not a fear-mongering kind of guy but influenza something they keep microbiologists up at night. so why was there a vaccine in 2009? and overly cautious fda did not

allowed to things. this occurred under the obama administration. the first thing that they did not allow for it adjuvants. an adjuvant is something that extends the vaccine supplied so it stimulates the immune response so you don't need as much vaccine if you had an adjuvant. this is not the controversial technology used in europe. it's used in europe but is not controversial technology. that was not allowed. secondly, at the last minute they ordered a switch from multi-dose to single dose vials. why? the reason is single dose vials have less thimerosal. thimerosal is the chemical which contains a little bit of mercury that the anti-vaccine crowd says causes autism. in 2009 this myth was thoroughly debunked and yet obama and the

fda gave into that impartially as a result we had a vaccine shortage. what was the outcome of the 2009 h1n1 influenza? 61 million americans in that being infected and 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,470 deaths. i'm not a person who says barack obama killed all those people. i don't believe that. i don't believe the fda killed all those people but i do believe that our bad policies contributed to this outcome. and how these illnesses -- think of the billions of dollars in health care costs we wasted simply because we weren't prepared in 2009 to deal with the h1n1 influenza pandemic. before we go back to more barack obama let's stop and recalled president george w. bush who is rightfully accused of manipulating scientific data often by barack obama himself. promoting science is about

ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology. president barack obama, march 9, 2009. did he live up to that? the bp oil spill was one of the biggest global oil spills in world history. how did the obama administration respond to this tragedy? quoting from "the los angeles times," taken together to reports paint a picture of a government who was as unprepared to deal with the catastrophic spill sbp as a departure from administration back, listen to this, withheld information from the public and more specific we scientists about how much oil was getting into the water, how much remained in how such estimates were calculated appeared to contradict obama's pledge to make government more transparent and trusting to his

promise that he would be more trustworthy and relying on facts and not hiding things from scientist was violating not only two years into his presidency but during one of the biggest environmental catastrophes or nation has ever seen. on the environment barack obama has a mixed record and i'm not sure of all of you will agree with my position on some of these issues but i know you guys are a great crowd and i know he will not agree with me 100%. he eliminated the ethanol subsidy which i think everyone here would agree with. first of all ethanol is a waste of money and secondly it reduces nitrous oxide which is horrible for the environment. compared to carbon dioxide it has a global warming potential that is 300 times greater than carbon dioxide so when you are making biofuel, let's just say this. the economist ran an article called biofools.

that is their opinion on biofuels. they think it's a horrible idea. he did put new limits on carbon emissions from coal power plants and i support that because i think we should transition to natural gas base gus kohl is very bad for the environment. there is a lot of heavy metal pockets and they have whole legs they set aside just to dump waste into. it's a nasty process and if we can get into natural gas that is a much better -- that's a win for everybody. that is where barack obama's good policy in the environment and. the bad plus he had still to this day no comprehensive climate change legislation. he spent all this time doing obama and in addition because he wanted to do cap-and-trade which i am not in favor of personally of cap-and-trade. i think the cabin -- carbon tax might be a better policy. that is the main thrust of their

climate change legislation that barely passed the house in 2012. was so popular that the the senate did need to take it up. joe manchin, he's a senator from west virginia, very famously took the cap-and-trade bill and tactic to a tree. he is a democrat. he shot it with a rifle. so that pretty much killed the legislation. he literally kill the legislation, so that is why that didn't go on in the senate. also, even though we have now had the ethanol subsidy for karn expire we have not waived the ethanol mandate for fuel so gasoline has to have 15% ethanol blended into. that is a horrible idea, horrible policy. the reason is there are people on the other side of the world right now who don't have food and where we are diverting our corn to make gas for our cars

people on the other side of the world starve. so it's not a good policy at all and we should and the ethanol mandate or at least waited for this year at the very least. now the ugly. cash for clunkers. clunker nomics. new cars under this program, so obviously if you're going to trade in your old car and get a new car, it's going to get better gas mileage with technology increasing. analysis shows that is clunker the clunker nomics had not existed for new cars would have only been point to three miles per gallon less efficient so that is the overall efficiency and increase, .23 miles per gallon. is save the u.s. an estimated 12,000 barrels of oil per day that we used 9 million barrels of oil per day so this is a literal drop in the bucket. there was a short-term bruised and car sales followed by a quick drop off, no long-term increase in car sales and the

cost to the taxpayer was $24,000 per car. i am not an economist but that sounds like a lot of cars. >> adding to it insults and injuries he brought up the price of used cars so eradicated whatever benefit there was. >> about the other thing, there are carbon emissions in building new cars and we we took old cars and smashed them. and then barack obama also ignored, we also know one of the common complaints that george bush consistently put in the mode of it industry and above the motive of the epa because he was big boy is -- of -- big oil and big business and you know the rigmarole. barack obama did the exact same thing. the epa said we need to decrease fog levels because fog is killing people and barack obama said no its it's not good for business so he did exactly what he accused george bush of doing through his campaign.

on the issue of nuclear waste i'm going to try to get through these next couple of slides here quickly because i have got some really juicy stories from the left that i have to get for you. barack obama is not realistically dealing with nuclear power. this has been the a political football for years ever since the reagan administration. he didn't want the nuclear power, he didn't want the nuclear waste plant in the east and he did built in the west. some texas congressman didn't wanted in a state so that is how nevada got stuck with it. it has been studied however, this land, the yucca mountain site for 25 years. the facility has already built that and a cost $13.5 billion. it is safer to store nuclear waste in one central location in the middle of nowhere apologies to nevada, than to scatter it around the country which is what our current policy is. our current policy is when the

nuclear power plant is done with the fuel you put it in a fuel pool, dry cast of incident on sight. that is less safe than taking it in and sticking it in a mountain underneath nevada. however the nuclear regulatory commission chair appointed by george bush and elevated by barack obama and he was the former senator to anti-yucca mountain senator harry reid, he withheld information from his colleagues and our seat. from "the wall street journal," the u.s. topic near power regulator strategic we withheld information from his colleagues in an effort to stop work on a controversial proposed waste dump. according to report by the agency's internal watchdog. this occurred by the way for months after barack obama took office. he had no intention of dealing with nuclear policy, not a priority and shut down yucca mountain because harry reid was in a tough battle in 2010 which

he won barely against sharron angle. and then finally i think this is finally for barack obama on solar power. obama said he wants quote green energy. he has two very bad policies of that if that is the case. one would give venture capitalist more money. solyndra which we all know -- was a technology that actually might work. it's called copper indium gal yam solenoid panels. these are expensive panels but they are more efficient than the cheap solar panels we get from china. china uses amorphous silicon so if you think of your calculator with the strips, they work with silicon. the price is silicon is probably going to go up as silicon becomes more and demand so therefore we should invest in this new technology. that is not what happened. the price of silicon came crashing down and along with its

solyndra's entire business model and along with it for $500 billion. so that was bad decision number one. subsidizing technology when you subsidize basic research. i'm completely in favor of subsidizing basic research. it has an appropriate role from government. that is when the federal government should back off and say look, you estimate on your own at this point and at some point solar power will be the energy of the future. the technology is just not there yet. maybe 10 or 20 years from now. so "the washington post" basically said i'm not going to read his whole quote here but the end of the line is that they gave an unprecedented glimpse as to the whole solyndra scandal, a glimpse and into high-level maneuvering by political connect the clean technology investors and that basic weight you know, if it's true that bush and i don't know, not an expert on george w. bush but if it's true that he was invested in big oil

and all of this his big oil buddies is the only true that barack obama bought it when he took office. his second bad policy. remember he said it's a goal to advance solar power so that makes it 31% tariff on chinese solar panels a little bit head scratching. obviously he's trying to save face a little bit in the face of salanter collapsing sony wants to protect the american consumer. enforcement when he slept in 31% tariff on cheap solar panels from china yet the impact of not installing solar panels in this country so he says he wants to support solar technology and then he slaps a tariff on china for doing that. i wrote a form on this if you can't beat them, tax them. so you decide, as president obama pro-science or is he just another politician? now, now the really fun stuff.

i would think d.c. is kind of a reasonable city in a lot of ways. it's near virginia, kind of in the south with good hometown values. come out to the left coast. come out to the left and you will see a whole different set of values. i live in seattle. i had been to portland frequently and i love san francisco and these are all great cities. are the bastions of good science policy lacks what we called snowmaggedon, december 2000 we had a big snowstorm. heaven forbid you don't use salt because that is bad for the environment particularly they said it was bad for puget sound. if anyone knows anything about puget puget sound it's a saltwater estuary so adding salt to the saltwater estuary probably okay and the salmon will be all right. instead, instead you take plows and the path down the snow and sprinkle sand on top.

how many of you here think that strategy would work? it did not. in fact we had ice potholes. you would be driving on top of this ice rink with sand on top and potholes would form in the eye so you would be going up and down. it was the worst thing i have ever seen. that is actually worse on the environment. sand is one of the things you want to keep off the streets because sand gets into the gills of fish and its hurts fish's assault is a better choice for the environments afghanistan. that it and work out well. mayor greg nickels was bounced in the primary and was replaced by a guy who immediately fix the problem i just cutting out road lanes and putting in bicycle lanes instead so i guess that fixed it. we have also implemented a plastic bag ban that does absolutely nothing to help the environment. you will see birds and turtles choking on plastic in the ocean. that is not usually due to

plastic tags. that is usually due to fishing gear, two things that were left over usually from fishermen. that is not usually due to safeway plastic bags or whatever grocery store you guys have around here. plastic tags are energy efficient. if you want to use a cotton bag instead you have to use of 173 times to even break even from an energy standpoint. moving on to portland, portland's motto is keep portland weird. that is not a problem. the water for edition is something invented in 1945 in grand rapids michigan. at the scene is one of the best public health triumph's because people who cannot go to the dentist, dentist, people who are poor can at least get some fluoride in that water to help prevent cavities. you see a drop in cavities when you floridana clutter. 200 million americans get floridana potter and portland rejected it.

oregon subsequently ranks at the bottom and children's dental health. many portlanders treasure their city distinctiveness of "the new york times" and i agree because being toothless is quirky and distinctive. basically am not i'm not going to read this from "the new york times" but basically a couple of weeks ago the city council portland finally approved for edition two began a 2014 really a round of applause for portland for turning 20th century. i love portland. if you're going to san francisco, be sure to bring a plunger. low low toilets actually signed into law by a president h. w. bush, bush 41 which requires -- now the impact of that is that sludge will back up in the city sewers and the mission bay neighborhood quoted that, smelled like rotten eggs. they are using $14 million of

taxpayer money to dump bleach into the sewer to clean up the problem that previously simply did not exist. bleach it is also an unfriendly chemical. all right, so who can you trust in science? well i think scientist, medical doctors and yes even governmental regulatory bodies like the epa are usually right. where i will nitpick with government regulators, sometimes think they tend to be a little too cautious. for instance we have gotten approval on e-cigarettes in e. cigarette should be healthier than regular cigarettes. on real clear -- not on realclearscience we try to link to the best science news, the best science analysis and that is what we do. we try to put aside the partisan bickering and focus on what is good science and good science policy. read the abstract.

those are good things to look at and when you look at a position like gmo, which side you trust, the american medical association, the national academy of sciences, the world health organization, or do you trust vita, the sierra club and the environment a working group, troops that are for the most part anti-gmo and anti-technology. the best medical doctors and scientists are fighting with gmo chu -- genitically-modified foods. i'm not into keeping score essentially. my book is not a response to it. it simply saying what what paul harvey would say, what's the rest of the story so we are saying look, the right get something's wrong but to pretend that the left is great on science isn't true and that was the point of our book. revealing where the left goes wrong in science. data is data and it doesn't have a political agenda. we have to learn to distinguish

science from policy. when scientist evelyn public policy they sometimes get in trouble so you need to learn to distinguish what the sign says from what the scientists speaking as a public policy advocate says. if we can put aside our political differences, we should be able to grade on what the left teaches us, you can handle the truth, apologies to colonel jessup and i would like to thank aei kenneth green, our mascot at uw who was instrumental in getting me here so thank you very much and one final slide. in this book we talked mostly about barack obama here. this -- that's just one chapter so imagine how much information we packed into this book. we talked about the obama administration, organic food, the future food environmentalism clean energy solar-powered vaccines big pharma animal research european science gender research science journalism

equivalents and important issues of 2012 and beyond. dataset, that's all i have. thank you very much. [applause] >> by their book. it is worth the investment and a read. i have a bunch of questions but i'm going to go to the floor after only asking one of them. could you talk a little bit about how to natural gas is a clean burning natural gas the darling of the environmental movement to the point where we now have a four on natural gas from the mainstream environmental movement? >> that's it rate question and john has a great answer to this. natural gas used to be the darling of the environment aleph. -based assay hey this is better than coal and oil and edvac to see buses driving around that are full of natural gas. now all of a sudden natural gases back. why?

in their vision, natural gas is simply a transitional fuel to wind power and solar power -- power but what we have since discovered is that we are sitting on a veritable goldmine of natural gas and because of that, they are now freaked out that there wind power and solar power ideas going to be set aside in favor of natural gas so they are not demonizing fracking and natural gas because they want their wind and solar power. >> we have microphones circulating. if you ask a question when you are called on please give your affiliation and remember the jeopardy rule to ask your question in the form of the question. we will start right down here in the front.

>> diane felber, clinical psychologist. is wonderful and encouraging fact should be agreed on by all sides. the plastic that question though, what about the huge floating continents of plastic in the pacific? >> yeah, that is actually not a bunch of plastic bags. you are referring to the pacific garbage patch. it's more like microscopic and small particles of plastic. it is bad. we don't want us there. that is a very bad thing. people can't pollute the planet. that becomes part of food chain with small organisms being these plastics in larger organisms feeding on that so we bioaccumulate and yes that's a problem but lasted bags from safeway don't seem to be the big contributor to this problem. >> i am just finishing up an article on this. it's not the plastic patch

exaggerated and what is actually in the. the problem is the left doesn't like to say compared to what so plastic eggs are bad but that organic cotton, the bag you got that was shipped by plane from turkey isn't exactly good for the planet and the fact that it carries and transmits disease from your vegetables to other foods, gross bacteria in the trunk of your car from leaking meat juices and they implicated cloth backs in a girls soccer team -- [inaudible] so it's not the plastic bags are great but the alternatives in a study done in the u.k. it turns out they are better than virtually any other kind of bag on the environment of grounds in term of their performance because there is very little energy in them and their produce more locally in that kind of thing.

>> that is a good point. one of the things that progressives fail to grasp is that they will save the rail against current technology, bpa poison in plastic bags are bad. what would you replace it with? if what you replace it with going to be safer and better for the environment? they don't now because everything in their eyes is an assault on the planet. >> down here. >> good afternoon. i have a question about mr. al gore's campaign, inconvenient truth and his involvement in science. do you feel his administration could have been more successful in some of the topics that you brought up and how much of this is really an effective part of their re-election campaign? in science now we don't hear much in debates so do you think that will become more prominent in the vice presidential debates

and subsequently again romney versus obama? >> i don't think science has ever played a large role in election outcome and for me that's unfortunate. do i think al gore would have been a better president? no. you know someone who routinely exaggerate science offends me as a scientist. because that is not what scientists were supposed to do. his movie inconvenient truth regularly took information and would stretch it to a point of well okay, it's still scientifically somewhat accurate but you are really stretching it here and he did that over and over and over again. his 20-foot rise in sea level is assuming that the greenland ice sheet melts and no one knows if that's going to happen or not. there was actually a lot of melting this past summer even on the art that. actually didn't have much i said

all this past summer so this is the problem but it's not useful to exaggerate a problem which is what he regularly did. when you are caught exaggerating a problem, you lose credibility and the science loses credibility so no i don't think al gore would have been a better spokesman because i don't think he did a good job at all. >> he did invent the internet. here in washington in 1988 i got to see a speech by al gore about developing the wild -- world wide web. but that is a different story. there is somebody over here and then i will come over to the side of the room. >> hi, and paul rogers here is a union from the concerned scientist. first of all thanks for the top. i really enjoyed the remarks. what can interested hardees do to help combat or reduce the

misinformation about science particularly when as he suggests it strongly connected to an overall worldview of cultural instability and how can you break do this? >> sometimes just getting good information out there doesn't seem to be in a. >> you are from the union of concerned scientists? the union of concerned scientists is anti-genitically-modified food and they take a neutral stance on nuclear power efforts to me is the anti-nuclear power because that is like saying what is your feeling on bunny rabbits? i am neutral and bunny rabbits. you can't be neutral and bunny rabbits so i think the union of concerned scientists has done a disservice -- i saw a couple of reports on failure to yield on how gmo does not increase crop yields. the crop yields in the united states are a little bit higher

but we are to have great technology. in the third world the developing world, gmo's are tremendously successful. they have increased crop yields 30, 40, 50% and profits for farmers. they are literally taking technology so i think a more balanced discussion is definitely needed on this and we need to stop focusing just on the risk and focus on the pros because there's no such thing as rent-free technology. cell phones cause risk. and talking on my cell phone i don't look to see the bus going to hit me while i'm crossing the street. every technology carries a risk but every technology also carries a pro and a balanced discussion, scientific discussion, balances the pros and the cons and makes its position from there. >> very good. we have a forest of hands. the gentleman back there in the blue shirt. i try to give our microphone

wielders exercise. >> you are tried to portray this anti-gmo sentiment as a left/right issue. i bummed that bump into this quite extensively in all the polls show that this is divided. people are concerned about gmo's and they care about their health and there was just a scientific study that came out, the first long-term study of its kind, and you can disparage that. okay, let's assume that it's not that. blitzes and there were not enough rats in the study and it was too small. if people are concerned about their food, why don't they have the right to labels so they can make a decision as to whether they want to be that food? it's as simple as that. >> there's a lot to deal with there. professor sarah laney and frances and anti-gmo activists. is a book coming out about why

we should not have gmo's in the movie coming out about why we should not be being gmo. let's dive into the details of the study. they used a strain of rat that was prone to getting cancer and they used a very small sample so you have a control group of 10 rats and another group of maybe 10 or 20 rats. of all the rats which have a lifetime risk of getting cancer of around 50 to 70%. when you design a study for your rat who are going to massively get cancer you need to study that looks at thousands of rats. that is one thing. the idea also that this was the first long-term study on gmo's is not true. there have been other long-term studies of gmo's which say they are perfectly fine another long-term studies looking at herbicides like life was -- so this is not the first time.

>> let's assume the worst and let's assume the study is not solid. there is no scientific study here. gia most were allowed into this country in the '90s. there is no study by the fda. >> first i want to call a hault to the debate. if you look back at the beginning of molecular biology and molecular kinetics there was a moratorium on genetic engineering put into place simply a precaution. and that was in the 1970s and early 80s so it's not to correct to say that no studies have been done on genetic modification. they have been on the way along and the other thing is i think what alex is arguing is not the people can't have their opinions but the promotion of the anti-gmo agenda is heavier on the left and on the right. individual people who are right in central have their point of view. one last point, labels can

easily move from being informational to being scary. all you have to do is look at what is going on with cigarette packs. they also tend to be one-sided so you'll have your label that says made with gmo week. the company won't be oval to say improved nutrition because of gmo. labeling is not as straightforward as you think it is when the government says you can label negatively and it has to be this much of your label it as easy to get that agenda taken a hold of by environmentalist groups or activist groups. ..

over here. my name is peterly vitamin. i agree with most of your science but i have a real problem how you interpret -- how you choose to interpret some of this. i wrote the statement for senator kony mac when he went to the floor to defend somatics of nuclear -- [inaudible] >> and he was a conservative, republican in leadership and we knew perfectly well we were going to have any problems with the democrats on this. and the point of our going to the floor and doing this was as he said, they want me to a ban a technique? i can't ban a technique. and so the whole question of

emphasis on what's happened like who allowed more cell lines and all of that, there was a political reality to this game and we were doing it to a bunch of covers to vote with us. they knew we would follow mack. on a number of things you sort of slant things that i don't think are fair. the whole fda, epa thing, they let a drug tews and the fda is terrible. they take too long they're too slow. it goes on repeatedly on they're pill bills. i have a lot of trouble if you're conclusion is i'm showing that barack obama is bad on science or not as good as gork -- burg -- george bush.

i don't think you can draw from what you have actually done here. >> what question could you like to ask? >> i would like you to say i am more biased on this than aappear. [laughter] >> i'm not going say that because i think that the left and the right are both bad at science when it comes down to it. the point of our book was not to pick sides. i mean, we say it throughout the introduction. it's not the point of the book to pick sides. the reason we wrote the book to say when the left side says we are proscience, we're going to exam that claim. okay. and that was the point of this. to exam that claim. is the left proscience in you're right. the right is bad assigns too. i would certainly not disagree with that. our point is science should be nonpartisan and politickings should be out of the process as much as possible. you can't completely do it.

i'm not saying bush is better than obama or obama is not the point. >> who gave . >> i'm going to guess it was george bush. >> yeah. >> mandate for fuel can nobody can franks and epa fines people. >> this lady in in the purple. >> hi, i really appreciate your efforts and i'm with you on promoting team science, i'm joan. i'm a policy policy for and historian of science recently retired from the national science foundation. you haven't purr persuaded me to not worry about pesticides. but i agree we should look at data. i want to ask and seriously with curiosity not with an argument about tracking. it seems to me that apart from

the political motives, which we don't need to debate, isn't fracking a really bad use of water? >> it's one use of water. it's used for thermal electricity power plants. using water to generate electricity is a regular use of water. in fact half our nation's water supply goes to doing that. is it a good idea with pollution. it's depends on how it set up. if the water is here and -- the idea you pollute the groundwater is political. it and all of the processes are seen by government regulators. they don't allow people to drill wells without any oversight. it's a process that's been going on. it's only recently in the news in the last years. we've been doing it for four 70

years. it's this is not a new technology. we have gotten better tat. glild add the point that fracking it created a -- so the recycling rink for water from fluids has escalading thatmatically. will are companies looking at no water fracking they use air instead of water. the company already have a reason to recycling which is to say it's bringing in new form of water and having to treat their water disposing of and hazard use waste. i think you're seeing -- you can't point it and sayings if a bad use of water. in a sense it doesn't exist in evolving technology over time. and so you're going to see changes in the amount of water. very quickly. >> gentleman back here in the red shirt.

>> paul, physician. the male to female ratio for autism is five to one. there's no study on the risk of circumcised versus circumcised male. chronic pelvic pain affects 9% of the population. it's associated with increased lifetime prevalence erectile i did function, et. cetera. they collected data in the paper but omitted it. cbc called it biased. is there some place where this correspondent can be published so people can review this and add to the question about circumcision, the long-term risk. it's become promoted universally for hiv/aids prevention. came out with circumcision. >> i have never heard of circumcision and autism.

>> to look tat. it hasn't been looked at. you don't think it should be looked at is the aid logs trumping science? >> i'm saying i haven't heard that. >> it hasn't been looked at. >> yeah. i've never heard of that. it's a biological . >> what about the government 0 prigs of data. if you haven't heard about it you haven't published the provide. i can provide the correspondence and anybody can review it. >> we'll move on to the man in the back. nick schultz. wave your hand. >> hi. i'm here at aei thank you for a stimulating presentation. i have two questions for you, if you wouldn't mind. the first is if you could talk about we're talking about to some extent the politicalization of science. most of which what happens in public policy political discussions. i'm wondering what your thoughts are on the politicalization of

science in academia, if there has been say a slight, i don't want to for lack of a better word say corruption of some scientific disciplines because of the interaction with politic. i haven't -- in my climate science. i think there could be other. >> i would hard to believe it's in gmo because of the biological the chemical, the physical sciences are about as far removed from political ideology as you can possibly imagine. my daily routine at the lab was to grow bacteria and do very bizarre things to them. and then get results from that. okay. my political philosophy played no role in what i did on a daily basis. i would say that on biology, chemistry, physics, agreology, strong my, politics probably

plays very little role. on the social sciences, yes, i think that you will, it is hard to imagine when a field like sociology is 30 to 1 democrats, republican. that doesn't affect the quality of the research that comes out of the field. yeah. and economics, by the way, which can ared the conservative social science. democrats outnumber republicans 3 to 1. it's hard to imagine that political ideology doesn't play a role in the social sciences. >> [inaudible] to differ a little bit. there does seem to be a probably when there's a high profit probably for research products leading to high level of attraction and fraud. becoming more and more better understood as there was a recent study that looked why papers are retractive. they found 75% are intelligencal fraud. >> but the overall reaction rate, they looked at they found

2500 approximately 2500. it was out of 25 million. the retraction rate is like.01%. it's extremely low. [inaudible] my name is -- is this on? my name is jeff vader. i work for the natural gas industry. i would like to address the water issue. when we frank a well. it uses about at same of water on the golf course uses in about three weeks. with that energy we're producing more natural gas that's creating a tremendous amount of jobs in this country and bringing manufacturing back. so it's kind of goes back to what you were talking about the trade-off. it's not either or. it's the factors. i have a question you mentioned on corn ethanol it creates nitrous oxide. are other ethanols created from other products create that? >> i don't know about that. i know, there are other biofuels

which have promise. and one of them iranically enough -- ironically enough which is algae which is able to take carbon dioxide and convert it to long chain fatty as sits which is diesel, biodiesel. don't loch all boo yo fuels together. they're not the all. converting dorn ethanol seems to be a bad idea. there are other types of biofuel which may have potential. >> the least of the problem, when you look at the nutrient loading causes dead disowns in the ocean antic dead zones, water ways and corn growing area that's massive amounts of water. and skyrocketing food prices. when the rites happen for food, it's not good for the environment either. >> next? actually there's another

question i want to ask about quick. the deepwater horizon situation, you mentioned that they with held information that was likely to happen. we we wrote about that. being biology we know the ocean is resilient to oil spills and the like. can you talk about, ordown do you know about the review panel with regard to the moratorium. >> i'm not familiar. are you familiar at all? >> i wondered if you looked on it. when they convene the review panel whether or not they should have moratorium. they rewrote the recommends and the people on the panel came out and said no. let go here then. >> you talked about the politicalization of science and criticized of regulation at the fda. in the case of gmo there is no

regulation. there's a blank slate. >> i don't want to have a debate between one person and the audience. >> what do you suggest there f there is no regulation what would you suggest to a fear about gmo. what kind of regulation other than having toits the regulation and refusing to allow independent researchers to fest their patent seeds. >> thank you. okay. so the fda's current policy, i think that it is true that the biotech company usual does their own testing. that's my understanding of it. do you know do you have any more insight on that if. >> they do their own testing was they have liability to worry about. and also, they are required to have approval regulatory approval before they can commercialize their drop. the research is done by the private sector. that's what you want. they actually know the technology better. you wouldn't want the testing to

be done by somebody who didn't understands the technology to make it. >> there's something that -- when you say there is no regulation. that's not true. the fda has a policy and the policy is known as substantially equivalence. when they essentially ask is if you have a genetically modified crop and you have a conventional crop does the question netically modified crop match the original crop nutrition. do they have the same nutrients. are there intox ins. >> the fda has not determined that. -- [inaudible] >> if you would like to have an independent review board do that. maybe that's a reasonable reform. here's what with the fda's policy is. what i'm trying to explain what the policy is. you say they don't have a poem nay do have a policy it's called substantial equivalence. what they will then do if the

fda determines that the food does not meet the equivalence. it is subject to full fda approval and not only do they have a say in it. if you want to plant it the epa and fda get involved. >> how can you expect to get a fair hearing? >> sir -- the rules of engagement here out of the window. >> he's a former -- guy. >> you might cut off the mic for the first time in six years i've been here. >> you're done with your questions. you had seven of them. >> you haven't answered them. >> take the mic from him, please. >> can we have an actual question in the form of a question? this lady here. >> i think it's on. going back to what paul asked earlier we can talk a lot about the problems and who is the worst and which side is doing which thing. what do you recommend in solution either from the scientific community either from the politician or the general

public. >> that's the 4eu6d ,000 question. and to address your first question, question determine which side is worse. that's not the game i like to play. okay. i'm not interested in point scoring and say withing, look republican, the republicans get a minus ten and the democrats get a minus fifteen. i don't care. my goal as a scientist and the science writer is to straighten the public record and to say that the conservatives get this evolution on climate change. they are wrong. the liberals are wrong on genetic modification. that's the role i see myself playing. that's the role we play on science. as for how do you improve communication? that's the $64,000. scientists don't have a strong lobbying group in washington. there a very small handful sentence lobbying group. they don't tend to vote on math. you don't see white lab coat

people have been protesting. >> i feel it's been intelligencal. so not as to appear bias. how do we -- i'm a scientist. how do we communicate without appearing to be biased? >> it is the most delicate type rope walk you can imagine. it is giving the science and then if you feel compelling to say what policy you think they should follow saying now i'm speaking as a policy advocate. and i think we should do this policy. okay. because that is a different discussion than the underlying since. i think making that distinction crystal clear is important for scientists to do. >> real quick question. what do you think about the argument that some make that the science journalist shouldn't carry both sides of ever issue. there are csh you used to shouldn't cover both sides. >> right. let me think of that.

i think that's been a big problem. that's partially why for so long people believe vaccines cause autism. the medical community, i'm being serious when the medical community never believed this. okay. i taught classes where i would, you know, bring it up. okay, there's concerns here with this and a professor in the back of the room said no there are no. there are no concerns about this. okay. it's not just not accepted in the medical community. part of the problem was that science journalists were then't the ones doing most of the reporting. it was general reporter. what do general reporters do? they get an opinion from the democrat and republican and that's the news for the day. that doesn't work in science. you can't get well -- the provaccine position and find an antivaccine cook and see what they say. it doesn't work like that in science. to do better science journalism it helps to have scientifically

knowledge able as science journalist. people who were former scientists. >> in fact, that's one of the problem with the imploding media. the people who are science writers are being let go and the science beat is going back to general. >> i believe it was ben from guardian who said that the decline of science journalism is the own fault and that when sciencists who become bloggers can do a better job at scientist communication than science journalist, that's a bad thing for science journalism. i mean, it's good for the public. but for the established media, it's not good for them. [inaudible] a question? >> here. >> thanks very much for this excellent presentation. it was interesting. i'm adam from the new . >> we read some of your stuff. >> thank you so much. one minor quibble with the presentation and a question.

so the quibble is you mentioned in passing that human cloning is banned in the united states. that, to my knowledge, is just not true. federal funding is prohibited from going to human cloning in the way there are under the -- [inaudible] other. >> i -- you may be correct on that. my knowledge is that cloning for the purpose of creating a new human being is illegal. that was my understanding of it. >> nope. >> am any not right about that? >> i'm happy to chat more afterwards. >> the fact of the moratorium. it's been condemned. i don't think it's been . >> there's no . >> okay. >> no law against it. >> thank you for correcting me that's a correction. to linger on the bioethics side now. one of my problems with the kind of proscience antiscience rubric that a few other people have quibbled with, you know, it

comes from, you know, looking at what the policies are that are being diabetessed proscience or antiscience. you presented president obama's stem cell policy and give a kind of summary of president bush's stem cell policy which you rightly noted was derided at the time by critics including many scientist activist. they got very at involvedded in the politics from 2001 on through maybe twech, 2008, on this issue. it was derived as being antiscience. and yet the policy was put in place to institute a kind of ethical boundary. to say here are things we don't want to permit. here will things we would like to encourage other avenues. this week, the nobel committee of the anobel assembly announced

a researcher who discovered induced stem cells . >> and gordon. >> in particular -- gordon had done cloning work with frogs decades ago. the discovery of induces plur are potent stem cell. the prevents need to destroy human embryos. he would be receiving, sharing the nobel prize this year. so coming around to the question. here's a policy president bush ice pots was put in place to stop and incentivizing and stop the funding of prevent the funding of human csh the direction of human embryo owe for the name of research for research purposes and it ended up encouraging other avenue news of scientific research we learned resulted in a nobel prize this week. finally after the long winded

come around. here's the question, i think this is a challenge to the antiscience and proscience rubric, i wonder if you'd say that in fact it can withstand this thick as we look over time. if it's a too shallow way of looking at things. whether it's coming from chris moon any on the left, or from from the poach you got here. things are more complicated than proscience or antisign would apply. >> you're correct. there is a role for bioethics in science. okay. and i would be hesitant to call someone antiscience if they are objecting on something on bioethical grounds. you can actually get a ph.d. in bioethics. that's how involved and complicated the field has become. so i would agree with you there is a value in not just plowings forward and doing whatever we want whenever we want. there's a quote from jeff gold

policewomen's character we were obsessed to see whether or not we could see do something. we didn't stop to think if we should. and heaven forbid i get my philosophy from jurassic park. he makes a point. that's the key role in bioethic. it is something we should be doing, i think. including the induced stem cells. those have proven -- that's not true.

how you felt about nasa spacex mirror ration, the international space station and the recent expedition and landing curiosity on mars. how does it play in to some of the ideas that you have if at automatic and what you are looking to seeing in the next couple of years that you think would be beneficial to not only the country but the . >> that's a great question. and young i think that space policy. i think nasa turning over some of the more routine taking cargo up and back, we call that routine. it's actually very dangerous.

i think turning that over to the private sector was a good move. i think it allows us to focus more on really big projects at the private sector may not be able to fund. because i can't conceive of a private company going to mars. just because what's the financial payoff? you get to mars and then? what? big red dirt planet. there's not a lot there. i see the role of nasa taking more of a broad, you know, put a moon colony on the moon. that would be kind of cool. go to mars, do things like that. if we have the money for that. i would like to see that. then the private sector doing more of the space tourism and some of the more routine cargo shuttles and things like that. i think it's a good direction it seems to be we're heading in. [inaudible] , you know, yons. >> if you look what's happening right now. we had a private launch to the space station a second private

launch to the space station. there is -- it's detailed through nasa at the point. there's funding for it. i'm optimistic. most companies are competing on space flight designs. i think that's why the private company will go to mars. bragging right other over the technology. they will spin off from the development. >> there's an idea the government would give an award to the first team that gets there. the first team that gets to mars gets $20 billion. that might be an motivating factor. i haven't been married to any idea on space policy. we're watching it evolve before our eyes. it's interesting to see where it goes. >> i have pictures on mars. i would rather us explore the ocean. we haven't mapped it. >> i will wrap us up. thank you for your attendants. have a great afternoon. [applause] is there a non-fiction author or bock you'd like to see foached on booktv?

send us an e-mail at booktv at c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. here's a look at books being published this week. former goldman sachs employee grelg smith expends in a recent column he wrote in the "new york times" about why he chose to leave the company. how corporate policy changed throughout his employment. "i why i left goldman sachs." alan ryan professor of politics at princeton provides a history of political philosophy. journalist aman a one-time biology student and homeless lay laborer in india. in "i'm learning liberty" first en