Intro to SELF + McCain!

So I mananged to successfully get into this Meeting the Climate Challenge in the Arctic Region symposium today. The speakers were nearly universally interesting and I was very impressed with both Senator McCain and Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD), Co-Chair of the House Climate Change Caucus. McCain's office was actually one of the sponsors; it was one of the results of a trip that he and 4 other senators made to Norway last year. McCain's speech wasn't spectacular, but his responses to questions were both entertaining and insightful. He was asked if he was surprised about the revelations that White House officials had edited scientific documents to downplay the links between greenhouse gases and global warming (see NYT story) and he deadpaned "I was shocked. Shocked." The audience, including McCain broke into laughter.

Apparently McCain and Lieberman wrote a bill called the Climate Stewardship Act, which among other things institutes a cap and trade system for carbon emissions, so they're both at the forefront of recent environmental legislation...which I hadn't known about until a few days ago. A guy about my age asked McCain about the previsions in the newly amended bill that supported nuclear power; basically environmentally groups are split over whether they should continue to support the bill given its support for nuclear energy. Here's a sampling of the opposition. McCain's response was that Europe had used safe nuclear power for 50 years and that while there is some small amount of waste - its disposal is a political issue, not an environmental one. McCain (paraphrasing) said that people who worry about Yucca Mountain in 10,000 years, but not rising global temperatures and CO2 now were simply being naive. He said he was far more concerned about what will happen in the next 70 years than what would happen in 10,000.

The Congressman's speech was largely about the "human condition" and its implications for him and his colleagues as they work to push environmental legislation through the House. The most interesting thing that he said was that you (environmental supporters) can't laugh at people who believe the world is 6,000 years old and that we can't damage the Earth because God is still watching us, instead you need to take their dogma seriously and work earnestly to convince them of your view; but you can't just discount it out of hand. It was an interesting insight and I hope this guy has good political fortunes in the future.

I finally talked to Bob over at SELF today, so I've got some prelimary research to do searching for potential funding sources. He suggested that I brainstorm potential projects that I could go which would leverage my engineering education. I awkwardly responded that I was in DC this summer because I was pretty sure I didn't want to be an engineer - I don't know if that came through entirely clearly, but such is life...In other news, I'd like to echo Sa'am's uncertainty about wtf I'm going to do with my life, but after this morning I'm relatively convinced (heaven help us all) that I really would like to give politics a whirl at some point...Problems on the order of countries and the world just intrigue me and I guess I think I might have something to offer in this sphere...The question is what should I do before that...(or after I'm miserably defeated ;-) ).

I've noticed that I'm incredibly efficient in the morning and after about 4...but that window between lunch and 4 might as well not exist...I came back to my "office" at ERT after the meeting down at SELF at 5:30 and instead of leaving then (as any sane person would have done), I started working again...until 6:15...on the upside, the metro was nearly empty. On the downside, I was in central DC for 10 hours today (I went in early for the symposium).

Now it's time for reading and a little World of Warcrafting...