2nd Try -- Info on GLOBE Initiative
STEVE YOUNG 703-235-5593
YOUNG.STEVE at EPAMAIL.EPA.GOV
Thu May 26 08:49:00 CDT 1994
1994
My apologies for forwarding a binary WP file the first time --
oops! Thanks to those who let me know. Let's try again...
The following on the GLOBE initiative may be of interest to this
list. Please share with other colleagues and lists, and forgive
any cross-postings. My thanks to Tim Horrigan for finding this in
the archives.
Steve
young.steve at epamail.epa.gov
US EPA and Smithsonian Biodiversity Program
Steve Young asked if anyone had the text of VP Gore's
announcement of the GLOBE Initiative. I looked through some
dusty old messages, and I found it! Here it is:
---------cut here------------------
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release April 22, 1994
PRESS BRIEFING
BY
THE VICE PRESIDENT,
JIM BAKER, ADMINISTRATOR OF NOAA,
DAN GOLDIN, ADMINISTRATOR OF NASA,
CAROL BROWNER, ADMINISTRATOR OF EPA,
NEAL LANE, DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION,
MADELEINE KUNIN, DEPUTY SECRETARY OF EDUCATION,
ELEANOR CONSTABLE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
KATIE MCGINTY, DIRECTOR OF OFFICE OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY,
AND
JACK GIBBONS, SCIENCE ADVISER TO THE PRESIDENT
The Briefing Room
9:45 A.M. EDT
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good morning, and thank you. I
want to acknowledge my colleagues here and then make a brief
announcement. Then two of them will have short statements, and
then we'll respond to your questions.
Jim Baker, Administrator of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration will make a short presentation after I
do, as will Dan Goldin, also Administrator of NASA. We are
joined by other participants in this program -- Carol Browner,
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Neal Lane,
Director of the National Science Foundation; Madeleine Kunin,
Deputy Secretary of Education; Elinor Constable, Assistant
Secretary of the Department of State. And from the White House,
Directors of the two White House offices that will be working on
the GLOBE program -- Katie McGinty, Office of Environmental
Policy, and Jack Gibbons, Office of Science and Technology Policy
and Science Adviser to the President.
We're announcing this morning a program to link
students in schools around the world in a worldwide effort to
monitor changes in the world's environment. Students will
monitor such things as temperature and rainfall initially in the
areas around their schools and each day feed the results into a
worldwide computer network that is in each case linked to the
participating school.
The information compiled by these students will be
instantaneously formed into a global image, produced by a
computer system here in the United States, that utilizes the
information to portray a graphic representation of what is
happening in the global environment that day. It will then be
displayed with hourly updates in the classrooms of the
participating schools and made available to news organizations
and others on an hourly basis.
The scientific community is participating in the
design of the information collection system and is extremely
interested in obtaining the new data that is simply not available
today. For example, they do not have information on the
distribution of rainfall on continents around the world, or good
readings of ground-level temperature in large areas of the
Earth's surface where these students will be supplying that
information.
We have built in quality control systems and
sampling techniques to validate the information as it is
collected. And we have put together a team of experts to utilize
the system for environmental education purposes, and to enable
the students to communicate among themselves.
If, for example, a school in Ecuador comes up with a
particularly useful approach to the environment, some
presentation about what they're doing can be made available to
their counterparts in other schools around the world.
This morning I had the opportunity to conduct a town
hall meeting with students from schools located on every
continent that talked about the program and, on Earth Day, gave
us a chance to share in a discussion of aspects of the
environment in which they are interested.
We will begin with 500 schools; by the end of next
year, we will have 1,000 schools. It may expand more rapidly
than that, I might say, because the expressions of interest in
participating in this program have been overwhelming just in the
last several days. And we have formal expressions of
enthusiastic support, which we'll provide for you this morning,
from Argentina, Australia, Benin in Africa, Bolivia, Canada,
Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, India, Israel, Japan,
Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Papua New
Guinea, Russia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. That
is the first wave of countries expressing support and
participating in the program. We anticipate that many, many
others will join in this program.
Eventually, in later phases of the evolution of this
program, we anticipate that students will begin reporting on a
daily basis on efforts to remediate problems in the environment.
For example, schools may report on how many trees they planted
this week or this month, or how streams were restocked with fish,
or whatever. In addition, we anticipate more complicated
observations of the environment as the program evolves with
students participating in activities such as bird counts in
particular areas -- bird counts during the migratory season
linking up schools along particular migratory routes.
But in the early phases, it will focus on relatively
more simple observations and the creation of this worldwide --
this image of the world's environment that they will be able to
see each day, knowing that they have helped to create that image
by collecting the information upon which it is based.
Now, let me now turn it over to Jim Baker, who is
Administrator of NOAA. And NOAA is the host agency here in the
United States for this program. And I'd like to ask Jim Baker to
say a few words, and he will then in turn introduce Dan Goldin.
ADMINISTRATOR BAKER: Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is pleased to
be the host agency for the GLOBE program -- the first steps
towards implementation of a grand vision of both enhancing
environmental awareness; of educating a broad and diverse
constituency; of schools about the environment and how to impact
the environment; and also to provide additional and very valuable
scientific information which we can add to our environmental data
bases so we have a better understanding of how the Earth works.
This is an international initiative, as The Vice
President mentioned, and it's also very much an interagency
initiative. We have representatives here from NASA, from the
National Science Foundation, EPA, the Department of State, and
the Department of Education -- all of whom are playing a very
strong role and using their resources to help pull this together.
We think this is a very exciting initiative. We've
been very pleased with the progress that has been made in the
last few months in pulling this together. And we're looking
forward to a major change in human behavior if the program can
actually be successful. So we're very pleased to be a part of
The Vice President's vision, the grand vision that he has.
Let me now turn this over to Dan Goldin, who is the
Administrator of NASA, and who has also been a key player in
pulling together the early planning stages here.
ADMINISTRATOR GOLDIN: Mr. Vice President, I'd like
to thank you for your vision. In one of our first meetings when
we got together, we talked about the priorities for NASA and how
it might be relevant to this country. And it became clear that
Mission to Planet Earth in understanding our environment was
crucial.
You know, when you look down on Planet Earth from
space you see a ball 8,000 miles in diameter surrounded by a thin
blue line -- of maybe tens of miles -- bright blue. And from
space you get the perspective that no one owns that environment,
no one country could put up boundaries, and we all share that air
we breathe -- it nurtures life.
And Mission to Planet Earth is the most ambitious
program set forth to understand that environment. But it
shouldn't just be a scientific endeavor, it must involve the
children of the world, the adults of the world. And this is
crucial. NASA is going to participate in GLOBE to tie together
our knowledge for Mission to Planet Earth, get zero ground-based
measurements to correlate with our space-based measurements, and
more importantly to get dissemination to work properly. So we're
really privileged and pleased to participate in this noble
program.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Let me
say just a couple of other words and then open it up to your
questions.
The communications system will be a combination of
the worldwide INTERNET and satellite-based communications systems
that are currently in existence and others that we anticipate
will be available within three to four years.
Secondly, this is a public-private partnership. A
great many private organizations are going to be participating
actively in helping to provide support for key elements of the
program, as other countries will be participating in it, as I
mentioned.
And may I say that the level of enthusiasm in these
other countries is difficult to exaggerate. Prime Minister John
Major contacted me personally to say he wants to emphasize not
only the United Kingdom's support but his personal enthusiastic
support for this. Prime Minister Keating of Australia, President
Akayev of Kyrgystan, King Hussein of Jordan -- many other world
leaders have expressed their personal enthusiasm and support for
this endeavor.
Many individuals in the private sector have been
very important to our efforts to develop this initiative. Tom
Van Sant (phonetic), with the Eyes on Earth program has been very
helpful in thinking this through and will be participating in it,
along with many others in the private sector.
And the agencies represented here will, of course,
have particular responsibilities. In addition to NOAA and NASA,
EPA is working very hard on coordination with existing
environmental programs and environmental education programs. The
Department of Education is working on educational quality control
and curricula development. The National Science Foundation is
serving as the liaison with nongovernmental organizations, and
also with curricula development. The Department of State is
helping us with the international coordination of program design
and implementation. And I'm grateful to them and to the White
House offices that have worked so hard on this initiative.
So, with that, let me throw it open to your
questions.
Q Mr. Vice President, to an environmental
community that seems to be waiting for something dramatic, like
the energy tax or higher CAFE standards, this may strike them as
something more along the lines of public relations. Can you look
the environmental community right in the eye and say that you are
satisfied with the progress this administration's made on the
environmental front?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, absolutely. We have turned
environmental policy around and headed it in the right direction.
Nobody said it would be easy, but we're making tremendous
progress. And you mentioned the energy tax as if we are somehow
to blame for the fact that the energy tax, or the BTU tax, was
not enacted. We proposed it and worked hard for it, and the fact
that there is not yet sufficient political support in the country
to convince the Congress to support an initiative like that is
something that we'll take our share of the blame for; but I'm not
sure that it's fair to say that having proposed it and fought for
it that we ought to be blamed for the fact that there wasn't
sufficient political support to adopt it.
We have taken dramatic steps in proposing an
environmental budget that really, as several environmental
organizations have said, is an Earth budget. It's a great
program. We have signed the Biodiversity Treaty. We have begun
enforcing the requirements to protect endangered species. We've
signed the Climate Change Convention and put forward a climate
action plan. We have engineered compromises, thanks to Carol
Browner and others, on the Northwest forest plan and the
Everglades. We're taking an innovative new approach to fix
problems with the Superfund program and to pass an excellent Safe
Drinking Water Act this year and a Clean Water Act. We're moving
forward on every front with energy efficiency and conservation,
with new public-private initiatives like the new generation of
vehicles.
And this initiative is going to start small but
expand, and I think in the future make a tremendous difference.
But it illustrates one simple fact: We've only been here 15-16
months; we've already brought about the progress that I just
listed; but we've got a lot of other initiatives that are still
in progress. And we want to be judged not on our ability to list
an agenda or to describe new initiatives, but on the results that
we produce. And we feel that we're beginning to produce those
results and, given a little bit more time, we'll be able to
produce a lot more results.
Q On CAFE standards, for instance, if your
voluntary programs on greenhouse gasses don't work, are you going
to revisit that issue and --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure, of course. And
that's always been in the works. Incremental progress on CAFE
standards is not put aside while we focus only on the historic
effort to triple fuel efficiency, which the automobile companies
are working with us to do.
I want to recognize Sandy McDonald in the audience,
with NOAA, who has done yeoman's work in bringing this project to
the state that it is now at.
[irrelevant questions, and answers, cut...]
Any other questions on this program? If not --
well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.
THE PRESS: Thank you
END10:11 A.M. EDT
---------cut here------------------
More information about the Taxacom
mailing list