China's Next Leap Forward: Innovation

DALLAS, July 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In summer edition of Issues in Science and Technology, former CIA director John Deutch challenges the assumption that the United States will maintain its global leadership in technological innovation. "A number of significant indicators," he writes, "suggest that China's innovative capability is increasing more rapidly than that of the United States, portending a weakening of the United States' relative global competitive position." He lays out concrete policy steps that the United States can implement to improve its innovation performance.

Roger Pielke Jr. finds that the scenarios and models underlying policy recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on highly dubious assumptions. These include "negative emissions" technologies that don't yet exist and predictions of "spontaneous decarbonization" that may be overly optimistic. Rather than fudging our assumptions about an uncertain future to make policy proposals work on paper, it may make more sense to adapt to a range of possible climate futures. In a separate article Bruce R. Guile and Rajul E. Pandya outline four ways tobetter adapt to a warming climate. 

Nuclear power touches on both innovation and climate concerns. The United States is ceding its leadership role in nuclear technologies and slowing innovation on a proven low-carbon energy technology. Michael J. Ford, Ahmed Abdulla, and M. Granger Morgan propose ways to help the United States regain ground in commercial reactor development and deployment. Also in the energy sector, most people are unaware that the natural gas pipeline system fails hundreds of times each year. That's because there's no national system to record these events and help improve reliability, according to Gerad Freeman, Jay Apt, and Michael Dworkin.

Elsewhere in the issue, Jeffrey Funk argues that patents may not be a very useful predictor of innovativeness and that a focus on patenting may in fact distract companies and researchers from developing more accurate measures of innovation. Tara Mahfoud, Christine Aicardi, Sahelia Datta, and Nikolas Rose go beyond the "dual-use" dichotomy to offer a more nuanced framework for guiding research that could have both military and civilian applications. Jack Barkenbus advocates a more measured approach to the commercialization of driverless cars.

ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY is the award-winning journal of the National Academies, the University of Texas at Dallas and Arizona State University.   www.issues.org

Contact: Kevin Finneran 202-641-1415

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SOURCE Issues in Science and Technology

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