SPS 2013: Week Two Comes to a Close

It's hard to believe, but we are already almost half-way through the 2013 session of the St. Albans School of Public Service!  After a jaunt out into the Maryland countryside for the July 4 carnival, our SPS students were happy to spend Friday on campus.  In the morning, much of the group watched a video of the Brookings Institution's event on cybersecurity with General Martin Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  A small SPS group had been to the event live, of course, and a cheer arose when we saw SPS student Jimmy Z. on screen asking General Dempsey a question.  We watched the video in preparation for a visit to SPS this upcoming Monday from Ian Wallace, a Visiting Fellow in cybersecurity at the Brookings.  (Click HERE for Mr. Wallace's biography.)

Later in the day, SPS 2013 split into class sections for economics class with Mr. Eagles and article discussion groups, led by SPS faculty, to discuss the concept of "geo-engineering": large scale environmental engineering projects that could conceivably combat global warming.  To give the discussion a springboard, SPS 2013 read an article by Michael Specter called The Climate Fixers.  (CLICK HERE for a link to The New Yorker online version of Mr. Specter's article.)  One "geo-engineering" idea would be to artificially inject particles into the stratosphere -- mimicking the effects of a large volcanic eruption -- to diminish the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet.  The concept of geo-engineering, and even small-scale experimentation in that direction, has been controversial in some circles, in part because some geo-engineering opponents fear that the prospect of a "big fix" would discourage policy-makers from current efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.  As always, the SPS faculty encouraged the students to put themselves into the shoes of policymakers faced with the question of whether to fund or encourage geo-engineering research.