vb-price-bw-pic21President Obama is working to resurrect science from the junk pile of superstition where the Bush administration dumped it eight years ago.

He started first with a public acceptance of global warming science and has recently lifted President Bush’s ban on stem cell research, and has come to the conclusion that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository will never be safe enough to store hot waste.

All three decisions are highly controversial of course. They will continue to cause bitter arguments and accusations, most of them ideological, and therefore fruitless. But the president has taken the absolutely crucial step of bringing science back into the arena of political viability.

Science is not the search for certainty and perfection.

Closed-minded political absolutists, and corporate PR judo masters, have taken science’s open-minded, trial and error quest for evidence-based reality and turned it into a weakness, not an ultimate strength. They’ve said, if science can’t be certain, you can’t make policy from scientific findings, no matter how close to certainty and consensus the evidence is.

President Obama has reversed the field on anti-scientific perfectionism. And not a moment too soon. While stem cell research, nuclear waste storage, and global warming are hot topics with the media, other evidence-based issues -– like water and drought in the West -– are far too important in the day to day lives of Americans to be caught in fruitless public relations arguments over the validity of science.

Everyone has opinions about water supply and water quality. Many of those opinions are based on self-interest. And when evidence, gained carefully by people applying the scientific method, goes against self-interest all hell can break loose.

A recent Associated Press article on the availability of clean water in Texas, for instance, seems to be a preview of what could be in store for New Mexico, both as a sighting on the horizon of the Texas monster gobbling up as much water as it can from weaker neighbors, and as a potential scenario.

A report by the office of the Texas State Comptroller, informed the AP, “The water wolf is lurking right outside the door. This could actually cost the state a whole lot of money.”

Drought and lowering of aquifers could cost Texas as much as $5 billion over the next 40 years, the comptroller said, recommending the state should repair leaky municipal water systems to conserve the waste of “a sizable a number” of gallons of water a day.

This nuts and bolts conservation approach is the first step in what will probably be a slow growing, expensive, and massive attempt on the part of the Texas state government to do stop wasting what water it has. And taxpayers will object. They will question data, argue about uncertainty and the unreliability of this and that.

But eventually, in a new era where evidence based policy wins out over ideology, Texas could get its act together, make the necessary public expenditures and become a conservation minded state. It’s either that, or try to take water from other areas, or simply run dry.

And the same will happen in New Mexico and all its major cities. Nuts and bolts conservation at the public expense will win begrudging favor with taxpayers, especially as science and politics clash in Colorado trying to decide how much of the Colorado River the state has available to it, as it struggles to meet its own needs with those of California, Arizona and the other Colorado Compact states.

A superb piece in High Country News recently relates the contest of science, politics, boosterism, and common sense in determining how much water the Colorado River actually has at the moment. This will have a powerful bearing on the growth of Albuquerque, as it depends more and more on Colorado River water from the San Juan/Chama water project.

You’d think that when Lake Powell and Lake Mead begin to measurably shrink, and shrink by as much as a third of their wet cycle size, that everyone would at least agree about measuring the flow of the river that feeds those lakes.

But, of course, it’s not as simple as that.

Everyone has an opinion. Some experts thought that Colorado had 1.5 million acre feet of water for itself, after serving other Colorado Compact states. One expert contended that in the drought that started in 1999, Colorado was left with a mere 150,000 acre feet of reliable water for its growth over the next quarter century.

Everyone wants to win such arguments. What President Obama’s resurrection of science as a reliable guide for public policy makes possible now is at least a level playing field on which corporate, municipal, agricultural and other interests can battle over facts and figures without the specter of superstition and divine intervention muddying the waters.

At some point in New Mexico and the Mountain West, voters will have to be convinced of the necessity of spending large amounts of public money to patch and modify existing water systems, to do the necessary research to more accurately pinpoint how much water actually exists in aquifers around the state, and to more accurately assess the quality of the water that we do have, in terms of the burden of years of military and industrial pollution.

Economist E.F Shumacher wrote in his book, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” that there are two kinds of problems in the world, divergent problems and convergent problems. Divergent problems are those from which there are no absolute answers, questions such “What’s the right way to educate a child?” People will argue about that forever, as they will over politics and religion and philosophy.

Divergent questions are dominated by politics.

Convergent questions are dominated by science based technology. What’s the best way to cut paper? What’s the cheapest way to save water? What kind of engine is required rocket human beings into space?

These are questions with potentially discrete answers. When absolutists and perfectionists try to turn convergent problems into divergent ones, for the sake of their own self interest, you find yourself living in a world in which science has, with private financial stimulus, been turned into a bearer of false witness.

Science is reliable in so far as it doubts itself, checks itself, is open to change and refutation at every step of the way.

Of course, water issues in the West deal with both divergent and convergent problems. But before a public policy debate can be useful, the gathering of convergent facts must be validated with public money.

We can argue about those facts, but they must exist and must be subject to more than merely ideological refutation.