Science Policy News for September 2, 2010

NY Times — The outlook for the exchange turned bleak once it became clear that governments meeting at the U.N.  Climate Change Conference in 2009, commonly known as the Copenhagen summit meeting, would not provide a new direction or stimulus to the market. And there has been little to cheer for the carbon trading business community ever since.

Business Green — Senate majority leader Harry Reid said yesterday that he will attempt to revive the stalled climate and energy bill ahead of November’s mid-term elections and is looking to secure Republican support in order to add a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) to the controversial legislation.

PopSci — The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn’t lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER – Cyber INsiDER Threat – the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen.

Houston Chronicle — Despite the company- picnic atmosphere, participants were unified in their anger over the direction of U.S. energy policy, which they see as favoring renewables and environmental interests and discounting the vital role fossil fuels still play in the nation’s economy.

NY Times — America once led the world in college graduation rates, he said, but now ranks 12th.  He provoked a class of education majors by suggesting that to overcome a decades-long shortage, math and science teachers should be paid more than English teachers. Students resisted.

LA Times — Activists had worked for passage of such pioneering measures as a ban on plastic grocery bags and expanded use of the sun, wind and other renewable resources to power California homes and businesses.

Nature News — This week, researchers from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis are collecting DNA from young fair-goers and their parents as part of an effort to uncover genetic influences on normal child health and development.

http://defensetech.org/Defense Tech — A recent Pentagon war game that ran the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship through simulated combat in the Gulf didn’t unfold quite as expected, according to participants. The LCS is custom built with the Gulf combat environment in mind: narrow and congested waters, a wide range of low-end threats from sea mines and swarms of fast attack craft to higher-end air-breathing submarines.

Baltimore Sun — The 170-page plan, submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency, outlines 75 “options” for reducing nutrient and sediment pollution enough to restore the bay’s troubled water quality by the end of this decade — five years ahead of the 2025 bay cleanup deadline the states earlier set for themselves.

The Review — A Sept. 21 hearing before the Environmental Protection Agency in Pittsburgh could bring changes to industry as broad as those of the Clean Air Act, activists told the Citizens Against Coal Ash during a meeting Wednesday.

Wired — Federal regulators are putting off efforts to regain authority over the nation’s internet providers while they seek renewed public input on net neutrality. The delay shows the intractability of the debate over wireless and wireline openness rules, and the ongoing shock waves of last month’s joint policy proposal from Google and Verizon to create a framework for Congress to enact new competitive rules for ISPs. That proposal in turn seeks to fill a vacuum left by a federal appeals court, which effectively stripped the FCC of its authority to oversee broadband earlier this year.