A Sputnik Moment without the Moon
I laughed yesterday when I first saw the SOTU excerpts with Obama’s description of a Sputnik moment. Mind you, he had already used–or rather, cribbed–the language before. So the language itself wasn’t funny.
Rather, it was that he planned to use it as an urgent call to action on the day that Carol Browner announced her resignation. The only way calling this a Sputnik moment makes sense, IMO, is if you can paint in very concrete terms the security threat that demands such urgency. And the urgent threat facing us–one badly exacerbated because of the particular industries where China is kicking our ass–is climate change. But with Browner’s departure also goes Obama’s focus on climate change, replaced instead by a vaguely defined clean energy race.
As David Roberts lays out,
[C]onsider the larger analogy at the heart of Obama’s speech: America is at a “Sputnik moment.” Well, why was Sputnik a Sputnik moment? Not because Americans said, “Wow, the USSR is getting really good at technology! We’re getting outcompeted!” No, what the public said was, “Holy sh*t! Our mortal enemy is putting stuff in space! They’re going to rain rockets down on us and we’re all going to die!” In other words, Sputnik was not some friendly challenge to see who can win the race to the future (or whatever). It was a threat. That’s what lit a fire under America’s ass and that’s why America rose to the challenge.Obama wants to launch a clean energy race. And good for him. But what are the stakes? What is the threat? Where is the urgency? If it’s just about international competition, why not focus on good macroeconomic policy — why go to such lengths to build up this economic sector, these technologies? Why not just leave it to the market?
Here’s why: The U.S. needs to get at or close to zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century or there will be severe and possibly irreversible changes in the climate, leading to massive, widespread human suffering. That’s why we don’t have time to wait for the invisible hand of the market. That’s why we need massive investments, tighter regulations, and a price on climate pollution. That’s the threat. Without it, a push for clean energy is a nice slogan that can easily be shunted aside when, oh, gas prices are rising, or there’s a recession, or Joe Manchin need to get reelected.
The threat of climate change is what justifies and animates the clean energy race. That’s the substantive need. [DR’s emphasis]
A Sputnik moment only works if you’ve laid out a compelling threat that demands the country work together to solve it. We are facing such a moment. But Obama won’t even name that threat by name.
Today I pulled up behind a car with a fish labelled “Truth” swallowing another fish, that one labelled “Darwin”, and recalled (IIRC) a study showing that (I think it was among more or less developed countries) the U.S. and Turkey were far and away the ones with the highest fraction of people who did not believe in the multi-million-year age of the earth and evolution of organisms.
Also, I just finished reading an old Loren Eiseley book, “The Firmament of Time”, which laid out the other beliefs that tend (well, “tended”, in Medieval times and 1800s) to go along with that kind of world view. One of the things is a belief that the world does not change in important ways; for instance, people apparently used to have a very hard time even conceiving of a species going extinct.
I don’t know whether that is part of the mental landscape in people who don’t “buy” evolution, but it would certainly be consistent with that position. And “global warming” would require believing that Man could alter (read, “muck up unmercifully”) God’s Perfect Design, and that just would not be an allowable concept.
So if the job gets done in the U.S. by emphasizing “competiveness” and “economic benefits” instead of getting Gore-d whenever planetary change is mentioned, I guess that, reluctantly, I see a justificastion for their strategy.
Which means Obama is adopting the Rovian technique of using words for their emotional association, unmoored from any connection to the facts, policy or action. It’s theater and a poor excuse for leadership or governance.
I agree completely.
I complained loudly to my wife this was no Sputnik DURING the SOTU.
There is no event.
There is no response.
There is not even a concrete plan for jobs.
I tuned in very briefly. Picked it up about the point he was talking about blanketing with hi-speed wifi. Then I left and put in laundry and came back to him making the worst analogy I’ve ever heard – something about throwing the engine out of an overweight plane and even though it might keep going awhile, that would be a bad thing later …
That, coupled with a bit I’d heard from the other room earlier about drawing some line in the sand and PROMISING to VETO ANY BILL WITH ANY EARMARK OF ANY KIND nonsense (between the fact that there are some very good earmarks and the fact that with wrangling this is a promise that sets itself up to be broken) resulted in me just turning him off.
Obama did not mention global warming even once in SOTU. I know last year he mentioned it several times.
When I heard him used the Sputik moment, I started thinking about all the people who kept urging Gore to adpopt a race to the moon, clean energy plan. Of course he never did. When I think of the race to the moon, I think of throwing everything you have into a project to make sure you get there, despite the challenges.
The only thing I heard from Obama was the exact opposite. We are only going to half ass this thing. We are going to make targeted cuts and investments to reach our loosely defined clean energy goal. He basically changed the space race goal to 1985 and instead of NASA he is using the 7th grade science fair.
Wouldn’t want to wake the masses into realizing that “the economy” of endless growth is a pyramid scheme that steals from future generations. That doesn’t fit into the script of “hope”.
A variation of EW’s titling wherein Obama’s allegory sput..sput…sputtered and died:
The only way we can have a “race to the moon” response to this “sputnik moment” is if the government directs funds toward those people and companies who are willing and able to respond to the climate challenge. But where would those funds come from, during a 5-year spending freeze? Will we expect the defense monies to contribute to solar and wind power plants? Will the interest payments on the debt be redirected to tide power? More hydro-electric power, less Medicaid? Electric cars subsidized by the Social Security funds?
Let’s be honest – the market will not race to zero-carbon emissions. Just as the oil and mining industries didn’t contribute a dime to the Apollo program. In my opinion, the Earth’s climate depends on our country (and others) redirecting defense spending toward clean energy, and toward improved energy efficiency. But I didn’t hear that in the SOTU.
Totally OT – But I couldn’t stop laughing at the comments in this piece over at Kevin Featherly’s blog (via Andrew Sullivan’s blog):
What’s Up With Bachmann’s Eyes?
ew-
your comments about the real crisis (or related crises) we face are wise and properly critical of the prez (and the american polity and press).
as a possible instance, my wife was telling me recently of a meeting of state and federal scientists regarding the possibility of a “river or rain” ( my terminology -a phenomenon in which a large, moisture-laden swath of air flows repeatedly (“trains) over a specific area) moves over the central valley of california.
the conclusion was the results could be more devastating than an earthquake.
not to mention the deficit of produce and fruits for the nation’s supermarkets from such a flood.
the central valley would fill up like a lake was the conclusion (in my words).
obama is such an inexperienced leader,
such an amateur president.
I think it is called an arc storm.
I’ve heard ‘storm train’. The ‘pineapple express’ is one version of it.
In early 1969, it rained so much, because of six weeks of ‘pineapple express’, that a man was able to go from Bakersfield to Stockton in a canoe. He said afterward that the longest portage was maybe as much as two miles.
That’s more than 200 miles.
marymccurin @11
thank you for supplying the name.
i had never heard of such an event; did not know it could exist.
now i’ll go and look it up for myself.
continuing from 10
see latimes, daisy nyguen, jan 14, 2011:
“scientists detail superstorm…”
behindthefall @1
i loved reading loren eiseley decades ago. i think i read everything he ever wrote.
for those reading along here, if you have not read eiseley make a point of doing so.
he was a rare talent.
think how good stephen jay gould was at explication;
eiseley was that good, or better,
and might have served as a model for gould.
I like the robotic romantic metaphor the president*s speech developed. The Grist writer excerpt emptywheel included sort of rambles polemically among several accurate observations of the spirit which Спутник (Sputnik) represented. However, contextualizing from several other vantages, I would add a few contemporary allusions from that era.
Consider, if you will, popular music of the time; e.g. rock and roll. At the Sputnik moment 1957, American teenage young adults had the decided advantage of having listened to Bill Haley and the Comets* title called *Rock around the Clock* for the preceding three years. Rock was being born but needed to go farther if there was to be a musical theme genre reflecting a new generation of the time. Teens in modern countries were interested in listening to the latest innovations in rock and roll.
Soon following the Soviets* 1957 placement of the Sputnik satellite in orbit, a new song appeared on the popular music soundscape entitled *Telstar*; the tune was more bland than *Rock around the Clock*, perhaps principally because of its epic narrative of the promise of electronic technology. **Telstar** the song celebrated an American satellite; indeed, there followed a dozen US satellites with the same anthropomorphic nomenclature **Telstar**. One of the peculiarities in the **Telstar** popular song soundtrack was a synthetic music sounding sub-theme which mimicked the beep of telemetry, the very sound which was the proof of Sputnik*s earlier successful orbiting of the planet.
Telstar and Sputnik represented elements of popular recognition in modern countries that communications were going global, whether they be military or just the telephone companies.
One year prior, in 1956, Shockley and associates received a Nobel physics prize for a decade of work inventing the transistor, a prototype of modern computer chips.
For the overly educated, I would include here mention of a 1957 John Cage talk at the Chicago meeting of the Music Teachers National Association, which examined the place which electronic and synthesized music had in modern music; 5 pages, 30 KB file size.
These popular music events from the timeframe of 1957 were occurring cleanly eleven years before a band named Blue Cheer gained some notoriety for deploying some new extra loud volume amplifiers (Marshall) for their brand of rock music.
Lest I omit more ordinary context for the Sputnik launching, in a part of the world which remains in turmoil since that time, in 1956 there was a hostile international faceoff named the Suez canal crisis.
In sum, I like the primitive metaphor the president*s State of the Union adapted. It serves as a moment of presidentially administered gazing into a somewhat technical scrapbook about modern societal awareness and public aspirations; it captures the novelty and perhaps foolishness of consciousness during a narrow timeslice of processes which have altered the world. And I agree with most of the comments above. Yet, I listen for the telemetry emanating from the climate change horizon, and am willing to work within whatever the slogan of the day proffers, provided there is real progress, and forward vision.
Sputnik is a bit obscure as icon, and perhaps inconsequential; and it elicited some primitive responses in several countries; its progeny even produced proliferation of space litter which menaces all new space vehicles. Even the US moon escapade could be examined under a harsh focused light; and in this regard I support the new initiatives in robotics. Times change; I think the president got it right. It has its ludicrous elements but I think it flies.