Science, Technology, and Public Policy

While states have agreed to substantial reduction of emissions in the Paris Agreement, the success of the Agreement strongly depends on the cooperation of large Multinational Corporations. Short of legal obligations, the authors discuss the effectiveness and moral legitimacy of voluntary approaches based on naming and shaming. They argue that effectiveness and legitimacy are closely tied together; as voluntary approaches are the only alternative to legally imposed duties, they are most morally defensible particularly if they would be the most effective in reducing the harmful greenhouse gases

Dr Olli Heinonen, S. Rajaratnam Professor of Strategic Studies, on 25 October 2016, in a RSIS seminar at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

"Values Conscious design may not be able to prevent the kind of deliberate fraud perpetrated by Volkswagen, but it could well have revealed Volkswagen's design choices as dubious, to say the least."

"In an unprecedented action, a court has ruled that the Dutch Government must reduce its greenhouse emissions by 25%. The landmark case was initiated by some 900 Dutch citizens and the verdict offers a legal breakthrough in a longstanding political stalemate, underlining the potential power of a well-informed grassroots lobby group in the environmental policy area"

"A key problem is that such controversy ultimately increases the likelihood of project failure. Think of major wind parks, carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects and shale gas schemes, for instance, which have been put under moratorium, or stopped altogether because of public opposition." The authors' research indicates that success or failure in such projects can be determined by how well discontent is handled in dialogue with those involved.

On January 30, 2015, Matthew Bunn presented "Mitigating Climate Change: How Much Can We Hope For From Nuclear Power?" for the Harvard University Model United Nations. The full presentation is below.

Safety has always been an important criterion for designing nuclear reactors, but in addition to safety, there are at least four other values that play a key role, namely, security (i.e., sabotage and proliferation), sustainability (i.e., environmental impacts, energy resource availability), economic viability (i.e., embarking on new technology and its continuation), as well as intergenerational justice (i.e., what we leave behind for future generations). This chapter reviews the evolution of generations of nuclear reactors (I, II, III, III, and IV) in terms of these values.

"Given the budgetary constraints under which spacefaring nations like the United States and India operate, cooperation is a valuable means to furthering our understanding of Earth's ecosystem."

Last October, at the foot of a rocky hillside near here, at a spot known as Degelen Mountain, several dozen Kazakh, Russian and American nuclear scientists and engineers gathered for a ceremony. The modest ribbon-cutting marked the conclusion of one of the largest and most complex nuclear security operations since the Cold War — to secure plutonium (enough to build a dozen or more nuclear weapons) that Soviet authorities had buried at the testing site years before and forgotten, leaving it vulnerable to terrorists and rogue states. The effort spanned 17 years, cost $150 million and involved a complex mix of intelligence, science, engineering, politics and sleuthing. This op-ed is based on documents and interviews with Kazakh, Russian and U.S. participants, and reveals the scope of the operation for the first time.

Despite substantial progress in improving nuclear security in recent years, there is more to be done.  The threats of nuclear theft and terrorism remain very real.  This paper recommends learning from the much stronger national and international efforts in nuclear safety, and in particular taking steps to build international understanding of the threat; establish effective performance objectives; assure performance; train and certify needed personnel; build security culture and exchange best practices; reduce the number of sites that need to be protected; and strengthen the international framework and continue the dialogue once leaders are no longer meeting regularly at the summit level.