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GEOMEDIA Check out the latest On the Web links, your connection to earth science friendly Web sites. The popular Geomedia feature is now available by topic. BOOKS: Deciphering the Roles of Science, Policy and Politics: Q&A With Author Roger Pielke Jr. Deciphering the Roles of Science, Policy and Politics: Q&A With Author Roger Pielke Jr.
When Roger Pielke Jr. was an undergraduate student working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., in the 1980s, he often heard scientists say that decision-making would be much more straightforward if only policymakers understood science. Later on, while working on his master’s degree and hanging out with the House Science Committee staff in Washington, D.C., he heard the staffers lament that if only scientists better understood the political world, science and policy would get along much better. These two thoughts left their mark on the young man. Pielke, now a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, elucidates the often nebulous relationship between science and policy in his new book The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. He describes four different roles that scientists can play. The “pure scientist” stays out of the policy arena completely. The “science arbiter” answers questions but doesn’t offer advice or an opinion on policy options. In contrast, the “issue advocate” voices an opinion on a particular topic in order to advance his or her own agenda. The “honest broker” presents a host of policy options but doesn’t advocate any one of them. The Honest Broker is a thought-provoking book that speaks to scientists who seek to play a role in policy and politics and provides a starting point for a debate about the different ways scientists can contribute. Any scientist would benefit from reading this book, as it is an eye-opener about the scientist-policymaking relationship. The book is not suitable for the lay person, however, who probably would have trouble following Pielke’s arguments and models and may, quite frankly, fall asleep during the first few pages. Pielke spoke with scientist and freelance writer Nicole Branan about the choices scientists have when presenting their research to policymakers and why it is important that they understand these choices. NB: Do you think that many scientists are unaware of the different roles they can choose to play in policy? NB: Why is it important that scientists choose which role they want to play in science policy? NB: You point out in your book that science has become used increasingly as a tool of politics and that its role in policy has been overshadowed. Can you give an example for that? An example of the political use of science is the part of the climate change debate that focuses on crediting or discrediting certain people who are participating in the debate. That’s the political use of science, but that says absolutely nothing about the policy question, which asks what we ought to be doing with respect to climate change. From where I sit, it doesn’t matter who wins or loses the power game if there are no good options on the table. My concern is that if all the focus is on winning and losing and identifying good guys and bad guys, then science becomes an artifact rather than a tool to help us make good decisions. NB: Has the government been asking more of the scientific community in recent years than it used to in the past? NB: One of the chapters in your book looks at the debate on whether or not to intervene in Iraq, which took place in 2002 and early 2003. How does this debate relate to science in policy? People in the scientific community are very quick to say that an agency like the CIA shouldn’t be advocating certain policies, but we seem to have a much more flexible attitude when it comes to scientists advocating stem cell research, for example. It seems to me that we ought to think carefully about the consistency. NB: What can scientists learn from the debate about the intervention in Iraq? Book review
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API |
Earlier this year, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group, launched a new ad campaign that the organization hopes will improve the industry’s image, both with the public and in Congress. |
Somewhere in Southeast Asia, a man sits in a small crowd, watching a shadow puppet play. As a warrior shadow slays a dragon shadow, the man doodles snakelike dragons on a sketchpad, clearly lost in thought.
This is the moody opening scene of Shell Oil’s nine-minute advertisement/film called Eureka, part of its Real Energy global communications campaign that is intended to promote goodwill and a more “green” outlook from the company by telling human stories of Shell employees engaging in creative problem-solving. The film, snippets of which ran as television ads earlier this year, appears in its full-length version on Shell’s Web site (www.shell.com/realenergy) and was also included as a DVD insert in magazines such as Wired, Popular Science and National Geographic. It is well-made, playing more like a professional documentary than an ad. It tells the compelling true story of Shell oil engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen, who was struggling to find a way to drill seemingly undrillable pockets of oil in offshore sites such as Shell’s Champion West field in Brunei. “We’d have to build thousands of other platforms just to reach them,” he tells a reporter in the film who has shown up to interrogate him. “Economically and environmentally, that’s just not acceptable.”
Complicating this puzzle is the engineer’s strained relationship with his teenage son back in Amsterdam. This seemingly unrelated subplot is not just taking the film’s Hollywood aesthetic to an extreme, but instead it ultimately leads to a reconciliation scene between father and son involving milkshakes and bendy-straws — the latter of which suddenly inspires van Ballegooijen to conceive of a new kind of drill. (He later tells an audience of Shell executives that he considered calling it a “bendy-straw” drill). The “snake wells” created by this drill are now in use in Shell’s West Oil Field in Brunei, the film tells us, and that technology is now helping to prolong the life of oilfields across the world. In an accompanying “making-of” film on Shell’s Web site, the film’s producers say that they wanted to talk about the company’s innovations by telling a rich human story, not “a simple sound bite.”
Although no other companies have yet produced such long film/ads, Shell isn’t the only company in the energy industry embarking on a softer, more creative approach to improving its image. According to a Nov. 9, 2006, article in The Wall Street Journal, the senior vice president of the marketing research firm Harris Interactive, Inc., Jean Statler, told executives at a petroleum industry meeting in late October 2006 that the oil industry’s image is “in a free-fall” and that “things are really as low as they’ve been in a long time — maybe ever.” Early this year, the American Petroleum Institute (API), an oil and gas industry trade group in Washington, D.C., launched a multimillion-dollar print, radio and television ad campaign that Harris Interactive is masterminding.
The ads, created by advertising company Blue Worldwide, the advertising division of the public relations firm Edelman, are API’s “way of really getting the facts out there and being part of the [energy] dialogue,” says Erin Thomson, director of communications at API. The ads are intended to persuade policymakers that the narrowing gap between supply and demand is to blame for rising prices, not oil industry collusion or price-fixing. They also advise against raising taxes on oil companies and suggest that policymakers allow for drilling in currently off-limit regions, such as offshore and in the Arctic.
However, the ads take a more subtle approach to these topics, focusing on such family-friendly slants as ensuring that energy needs for future generations will be met, as well as on new, “greener” fuels and technologies, such as ultra-low-sulfur diesel (one ad reads: “Think 18-wheel air freshener”). Another ad focuses on a message that API executives have repeatedly relayed to Congress this year — fears of a return to the long gas lines of the 1970s — with a TV spot that drives the point home using 1970s-era graphics and groovy disco-ish background music.
Chevron Corporation also launched its own advertising campaign in late September, hiring a Hollywood cinematographer to film a series of television ads that will air around the world in eight different languages. Like Shell’s film, Chevron’s ads take a softer, human approach, focusing on its employees’ efforts at problem-solving and the message that fossil fuels are necessary to the world’s energy supply, even as companies explore alternative fuel options. “At Chevron, ‘human energy’ captures our positive spirit in delivering energy to a rapidly changing world,” said Rhonda Zygocki, Chevron vice president of Policy, Government and Public Affairs, in a Sept. 28 Chevron press release.
Whether such kinder, gentler ad campaigns will ultimately help change public perception of the petroleum industry remains to be seen. It has worked before: Harris Interactive has, in the past, also helped to redefine the image of embattled products from plastics to milk (“Got milk?”), according to the Journal. Evidence of the petroleum ads’ impact so far is still scanty — “I can tell you anecdotally that [the 1970s ad], for example, is one we tend to get more calls on,” Thomson says. “It’s a funny and humorous way of grabbing people’s attention.” And in the long run, it may be that these ads will provide the oil industry with a breath of fresh air.
Links:
www.shell.com/realenergy
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