CAREFUL WITH THAT PLANET, MR PRESIDENT
By Diana Liverman
The Guardian
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Diana Liverman spent years as a senior climate adviser in the US. Now back in the UK, she argues for American scientists to be freed from their fear of speaking out on global warming -- before it's too late
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In 1980, when I left England to do postgraduate work in California, the United States was a world leader in environmental policy supported by a respected and well funded environmental science community. I had few regrets about leaving what seemed at the time to be a narrowly disciplinary, unexciting, irrelevant and rather chauvinistic British research culture.
How things have changed. Almost 25 years later, I'm back in England, attracted by the chance to direct the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, with its focus on the policy challenges of climate change, energy and conservation. It's a relief to be in a country where climate change is seen as a high priority.
To be a scientist working on climate change in the US is to be frustrated by the backlash against environmental science, research budgets cuts and by the American media's general lack of interest in environmental issues.
