News Briefs
WOODROW WILSON CENTER
The U.S. EPA is about to confront the “hardest environmental challenge it will ever face,” David Rejeski told attendees at the agency’s annual Science Forum in Washington, DC, on May 5. Rejeski is the director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and he contends that the technologies beginning to emerge from what he calls “the second industrial revolution” are so unlike what has come before that the agency needs to establish a Human Genome-like program aimed at assessing their environmental, legal, and social implications. Such a program should have at least a $30 million budget, said Rejeski, who initially gave his talk at an Office of Research and Development retreat. He also called on EPA to devote 40–50% of its environmental research budget over the next five years to shaping the technological infrastructure that is emerging as part of this revolution. During his well-attended address on emerging technologies at the Science Forum, Rejeski held up a Babolat tennis racquet made of carbon nanotubes as emblematic of the new manufacturing paradigm. “How, where, and whether products get made is changing,” he said. These changes are enabled by the interplay of new developments in nanotechnology, genetics, and information technology, he said. As the
David Rejeski directs the Foresight and Governance Project, which aims to stimulate long-term thinking and planning in the public sector.
technologies converge, they make it possible for the industries using them to embrace an exponential rate of change, he continued. There is enough biology in the mix to pose the question of whether things will make themselves, he said. The new technology is already altering industrial waste products and emissions, and it demands a very different response from EPA, he said. However, since the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was closed in 1995, the government has insufficient institutional mechanisms for coping with new technology, he said. The idea of making protective armor from spider silk produced by transgenic sheep sounds outlandish, Rejeski said, but Nexia Biotechnologies Corporation is actively commercializing the technology. And experts expect that computer logic could be produced biologically or chemically within a decade. The future of environmental oversight promises to be especially complicated because of how the new technologies are affecting where products get made, Rejeski said. They are becoming small enough to transform manufacturing into a mobile, nonpoint source. “We always believed we could find industry if we had an address. That will stop,” Rejeski said. Environmental impacts have historically been the unintended consequences of technological development and design, but Rejeski contends that a reactive approach on the part of government regulators will become untenable as the pace of scientific and technological progress increases. Instead, regulators will need to be proactively involved in assessing the environmental ramifications of products while they are still being designed—and may not even exist outside a computer. EPA will need to be able to intervene at a very early stage to avoid irreversible damages, Rejeski says. Otherwise, regulators “are going to be continually surprised—or shocked—by what comes out,” he said. —KELLYN BETTS
EU behind Kyoto schedule Unless two-thirds of European Union (EU) member states take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, they will miss their targets under the Kyoto Protocol, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). The Agency’s figures show that Ireland, Spain, and Portugal are the least likely to meet their targets; only Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden and Luxembourg are on track. EU emissions rose in 2001 for the second year running, mainly because demand for heating fuel increased during a particularly cold winter, transport emissions rose, and more fossil fuels were used to produce electricity. In 2001, overall emissions were 2.3% below 1990 levels. The EU has pledged an 8% reduction from 1990 levels by 2008–12. The EEA’s can be found at http://reports.eea.eu. int/technical_report_2003_95/en.
Status quo stymies environmental progress The pace of market-based and information-driven reforms to environmental laws has ground to a halt during the Bush administration, according to a recent report published by the Progressive Policy Institute, a research think tank in Washington, DC. Back to the Future: How To Put Environmental Modernization Back on Track criticizes the Bush administration for failing to replace “command-and-control” regulations with market-based ones. The report points to examples such as Bush’s abandoned campaign commitment of a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions, and the reluctance to move environmental decision making to the states. The report is found at www.ppionline. org.
JULY 1, 2003 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ■ 247 A
PHOTODISC
Will EPA shape the future?
